Departure

Leaving home is surprisingly anti-climactic. At least it becomes that way as you get older.

It’s not like Claire Fisher’s flight from Los Angeles in the tear-jerking series finale of Six Feet Under. There’s no montage to accompany your departure; no Sia to soundtrack your emotions. 

You live in some city. You develop your routine: your chosen coffee haunt, your local watering hole, your over-priced green juice dispensary. You color your commute with whatever podcast, magazine, or iPhone game suits your fancy. You internalize the ins and outs of your city, proudly circumscribing its cultural underpinnings into your DNA… and then it’s just gone. 

Maybe you made the time to say goodbye to your closest friends. Maybe you didn’t. Maybe you just up and left. Maybe saying goodbye felt superfluous, like attempting to add a period to an unfinished sentence. Maybe you preferred to couch your discomfort with saying goodbye in the saccharine safety of cliches: “Come visit!” “I’ll see you again so soon,” “It’s not goodbye forever, just for now.”

In any case, you left New York City without saying goodbye to the majority of your friends and family: a weighty feather, now tucked neatly in your cap to try and reconcile over the next couple thousand miles.

And now you’re peeling down the New Jersey turnpike under saline-colored skies, Bruce blasting rather typically as you struggle to process the odd nullness of massive life change. 

The first rest stop comes, with its requisite Popeye’s. If America still worships the car, its rest stops help enshrine that piety. The notion of a “crossroads” once held some romance to it, before the advent of Barkthins.

Yoga on a grassy embankment to ease a hip muscle already sore from (only?!) an hour of driving, and back to it.

It takes approximately six hours of driving for the need to just fucking GET THERE to overshadow the allure of wherever it is you’re going.

That said, wandering along Chapel Hill’s tree-lined roads under the cover of darkness and cricketsong, I felt sweetly reminded of why I had chosen to leave New York City in the first place: to just be somewhere, anywhere, else.