These are the days when you dream and dream and dream about opportunities stretching before you, the paths sprawling every which way, offering a chance to escape complications better left behind. Imagine all of the places that you could possibly travel, all the different ways you can recreate yourself.



What holds you back?

What keeps you from going on one side, and what tugs you back from the other?

When you leave, you never just leave behind a tattered couch and strangled curtains.
You never step away only from the too-tall heels, shoved in a corner to be discovered another time.
It's never just the park you loitered at when your horizon matched the skies gathering rain in their pockets, never just the street you dreamed about living on, or the parking spot you treasured coming home to late at night.

It's the eyes, the hair, the lips, the arms, legs, feet, toes, fingers, even knees
of someone.
It's the laugh, the sigh that exhales a world's weight, cracked knuckles in a silence and a cascade of curls transferred from shoulder to shoulder, both browned from the summer sun.
It's the arms that have wrapped around your body, your waist, anchoring you after a fall, after regret has been born.




Departure tips this soul masked as tissue, blood, veins, precariously toward the edge, wrenching what has touched it to the core from contact.

Replanted to a foreign bed, slowly becoming native soil.