Break the enormity of a thing down and down again, until it becomes nothing more than a series of lists to be checked off, and the act of leaving a place that is, quite literally, in your bones¹ goes from mountain to molehill. Proceed with enough purpose to get through the whole thing but not too much; more certain than any calcified anything has been the frankly inconvenient tendency of adrenal tsunami to lay waste to any sort of forward motion².

Maybe it's brought forth by some tectonically unknowable impulse—lizard-brain hangovers in some Verneian psychic centre of the world, hammering deep roots and rendering an already-shaky place wholly uninhabitable.

Maybe you're garden-variety crazy, and these fanciful explanations are just a way to avoid dealing with the reality of being up against yourself, that way.

Either way: breathe. Feel the first edges of winter in the air, search for the first taste of the inescapable rain you find yourself missing during summer days, wonder if the wind will bring you a little of the ocean.

Add these things to the list of things you'll miss, and wonder if you'll feel them again before you leave, and wonder what the air smells like in the place that you're moving to, and what it'll smell like in all the places you'll go before returning³.



1. left arm broken, age 6; jaws realigned, age 24; lifetime of backyard vegetables.
2. replaced, instead, with the twin urges to be alone or to be immersed in a sea of people.
3. it's not a certain thing, you keep saying, that you'll ever return, but there's probably enough iron in the surgical steel in your jaws to work like a compass and drag you home, face-first.