I walked home from school on the last day of classes on
streets that were almost illusory for me.
For three years I had walked these same streets twice a day and yet now
they had no influence over me. I knew
that I would return to a place that was not home- to where home had been packed
away neatly and carefully into numbered boxes- to a new emptiness with shadows
of the reality my brain superimposes on the vacant apartment.
My mother and sister had spent the day packing and I
pictured the apartment filled with the boxes which herald the life change being
made; different for each of us as we stood on a figurative precipice- the
anticipation mixed with fear blossomed as if I stood in line on a
rollercoaster. Rather than face the long
and boring hours of this fear, I wandered from the familiar path. It all looked the same, even though I was
leaving. Maybe that was the most
depressing part. I knew that everything
would continue as they were even after I was gone. There is nothing like moving to convince a
person of their own insignificance.
I don’t know how long I sat there, staring through the trees
to the sky, reveling in my own irrelevance as the sky darkened and changed. The
first raindrop fell as the sky changed from blue to mood ring purple, shifting
disappearing behind the brighter orange of the clouds. I sat still, unperturbed by the rain. It helped me feel sorry for myself and I
welcomed it.
It was in those last few days in Philadelphia that I felt
any kind of connection with the city in which I had lived for three years. Until leaving became a reality, I had hated
the place with a passion. Now the people
I knew passed into the realm of nostalgia as better friends, the stores and the
streets colored with the marketing of memory.
It was then that I realized- I had been happy here, and I hadn’t
noticed.
