#18 Leaving, Losing
May 2023 | Yerevan, Armenia
I did not go gently, just as the poem dictates. But I didn’t go kicking and screaming either, no noble fight, no honor really.
No, I went crying. I let myself soak in my sorrow so long that I came out wrinkled and pruny and wet with salt water.
When I left, I did not take all of myself. I lost something. But that isn’t accurate, because whatever I lost, it did not go gently either. Not like the keys that fell out of my pocket that one day I decided to walk an hour to the mall, that slipped away without my noticing.
This, I noticed. This was like a jacket sleeve snagging onto a branch. This was pulling and pulling until it ripped at the seams where the arm meets the shoulder. Except when I looked down at the damage, I saw that it wasn’t fabric – it was my own flesh, torn and bleeding.
Leaving Armenia was a ripping. A fight within myself, between the knowledge that my decision was a good one, a sound one, and the simultaneous conviction that I was ripping myself away from my own happiness.
The job is a good one, its mission so fully aligned with my own. I get to live in a new city, albeit an American city. A city I will get to know better. A city I never cared to know better. In the country that – after four years of living away – I let fall to the wayside.
I never planned to be away from America for so long. But as the months turned into years, I found there was still so much more to learn, to love, in the world outside.
Now I am back, and I am floating. Not on a cloud – no, on an ocean. With no direction, no recollection of how I got here. Awakened so rudely from the most wonderful dream. Surrounded by sunlight – harsh and bright and biting like the cold. Numbing the wound, not healing it exactly, but staunching the flow of blood. A tourniquet so tight that it does not let the feeling in. Numb. The edges, once warm, turn purple and blue.
Until I think for a moment, and remember that I chose this. Chose this new life in the country I used to call home. In the country I no longer view as home. In the country I will have to learn to accept as home.
And the doubt comes back with a vengeance, that I had made a decision so catastrophically wrong, and I wonder if my heart might feel so much that it simply stops, like they so often do in those old Victorian novels.
When I was young I thought bravery was some big heroic act, the likes of which I’d read in fantasy novels, adventure stories. Running through the flames, fighting monsters, thwarting grand plots to destroy the world as we know it. Or die trying.
But maybe bravery is this. To venture into a new unknown, an unglamorous unknown, uncomfortable and afraid, heart ready to burst. With nothing to reassure you but your own decisions – this world through which you’ve carved a path. With a hypothetical arm missing. With heartache settling into your stomach, making its home.
If you’d like to go back and read my past musings and meltdowns, hit this link.