I have been thinking about leaving.
Not the kind
that needs a suitcase.
The quieter kind.
The kind where you stop explaining
why you are tired,
stop defending the pieces of yourself
that keep falling off,
stop asking a place
to become home
just because you stayed there long enough.
I want to go somewhere
no one can follow me.
Somewhere my name
doesn’t arrive before I do.
Somewhere I can be nothing
for a little while.
Not someone’s daughter.
Not someone’s mother.
Not someone’s almost.
Not the woman who stayed
when every part of her
was whispering otherwise.
Just a body
moving toward somewhere
it hasn’t been before.
I’ve started looking at roads differently.
At doors.
At the dark beyond the windows
when everyone else has gone to sleep.
There is a strange comfort
in knowing
there are always ways to leave.
I don’t mean that
the way you think I mean it.
Or maybe I do.
That is the problem
with being this tired.
Everything begins
to sound like the same sentence.
I want to go home.
But I cannot find it
in the places I have lived.
Not in the bed.
Not in the arms around me.
Not in the city
that keeps waking up
as though nothing has happened.
Sometimes I feel like home
is just one breath away.
And it scares me.
Because I don’t know
if I am longing
for the place I haven’t found,
or for the moment
when I no longer have to look.
And perhaps
that is what frightens me most:
how easily
the two can sound
like the same thing.
Let me go home....