Flaw Salad

You decide to leave. It’s not a decision, exactly, so much as a truth you can no longer deny. You feel it in your teeth and your bones and the hairs on your neck. You feel leaving in your collarbone, where it meets in the middle and makes that dip you like to run your fingers across when you’re thinking or you’re bored. You feel it coursing through you—it’s time to go—and you do.

You pack away pieces of your life, and you carry them someplace new. You bring your memories and your habits and your beautiful teapot from that much-beloved friend. You wonder at how many lives you’ve lived, and you hold bits of each of them in your hands as you prepare to leave. You put them into boxes and feel a finality in the gesture—there, this one is gone—until you’ve emptied every cranny, and you’re blank and fresh and new.

You are surprised, then, to arrive and to find it all still with you. You once again cup that dried rose from the birthday bouquet and that picture from the jungle and that ceramic hippopotamus from your last great love, and as they pass through your fingers in your new home, they feel familiar and foreign and like ghosts. You find yourself surrounded by you, and you thought you’d left yourself behind.

For a moment, you revolt, and then you remember how far you’ve come with these legs and this face and this collection of frivolous things, and you smile as you don your favorite shirt. You are the person you always were, and you decide that’s an okay thing to be.