On Leaving

(a piece on why it never seems like our first rodeo)

Be responsible, little one. Don’t loom, don’t be inescapable, don’t be dependent like the ones who haunt you, the ones who can’t contain themselves or anyone else. The embarrassing Children. The ones whose neediness is ugly. Whose anger is reckless. Whose sadness is debilitating. Even monstrous at times. You don’t want to be like that, do you? You’re not like that. You’re good.

Be a Big Kid. But also, be small. Become smaller and more manageable, easier, calmer, more digestible. Less of what’s wrong — less of everything, actually, in order to make more room for what’s Right. Pack up everything rock-heavy and too meaningful to bear, everything furry-soft or blindingly colorful, everything sickly sweet and candy bright. Anything that you carry around in your two small fists for comfort and any hotness or tension left in your fingers from swallowing all that broccoli, store it away in the basement with other useless things you ought to have outgrown by now.

Oh, don’t be sad, don’t cry. There’s still occasions when you can take the boxes out every once in a while. Put them on display in a glass case in the corner of the basement where a little light from the window peeks through, see? Don’t reach past the glass, of course, but remembering is nice. Everyone remembers these things fondly.

For an evening. For Visitors. To be seen in glimpses, to be tolerated in measure, but these things are wholly inappropriate to decorate with on the main floor. At the end of the night, pack them up and put them away again, how lovely but we really have to go now, it’s so late. See you in a month, a year? No worries either way, of course. Anytime.

How do you outgrow something you were never allowed to keep?

You leave yourself. You leave yourself behind along with any sense of need, of fear or nervousness, of beauty or intensity, leave yourself in your memories and glimpses and moments, breathless behind the glass on which you ought not leave fingerprints or any other signs of life. And anyone else who shows too much interest in those boxes — you have to leave them, too.

Those things can’t live upstairs, after all, and neither can anyone who won’t leave them behind. Even children have to let go of their ratty blankets eventually. Leave them if they can’t act tolerably on the echoing tile of that tasteful and neutral-toned first floor. The only floor that’s safe to exist on for longer than an evening. The place you can invite respectable people, respectable things. The place that you can respect yourself for being adult and normal and Okay, where you don’t make anyone too uncomfortable to bear. Where the fridge and the heat and the food and the family is, where you are welcome. Where you know what’s going to be said or not said, and how you’ll feel when it is or isn’t (feelings small enough to Stay through). Where the bills get paid and the lights stay on and at least you know what to expect. 

Leave them down there with the dust and the mice and the rumpled cardboard that shields everyone’s eyes from the cloying vibrancy of everything those boxes contain, along with everything else that’s shameful and unacceptable to love. Just visit, every once in a while, and find a way to let that be Enough. It’s enough for anyone who isn’t reckless and monstrous, isn’t it? Anything more would be

So inappropriate.