day 1. leaving

Today was an exercise in leaving.

I left many times and returned to leave again.

I still haven’t mastered it.

I know it is easy.

Not too long ago I even wrote it was easy,

I wrote it is the easiest thing you can do.

Pack your things

open your door

close it behind you

walk.

But the easiest things are the hardest.

I thought of a poem a friend gave me last year when I walked to France and he walked with me one day. It is by Derek Walcott.


Love after love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
 

(today's story is for Albert van Veenendaal, I am leaving the house he will be staying in)