departures (1)

Thus it is that every country to which you have grown accustomed holds a spell over you.

--Diodorus Siculus

In every parting there is a latent germ of madness.

--Goethe

And yet you cannot avoid the thought of departure, its implications, its divisions, its whirlwind of emotions.

Has it ever been otherwise?

An end and a beginning. A loss and a gain. What you leave behind, what you take with you.

What will be born.

Breaking with a past, projecting a future. Stripping off the accommodating self, redefining contours, recovering freedom, hope (even if only temporarily).

But this is only in hindsight. At the moment of departure, what weighs heavily is separation -- from once beloved others, from things that once defined you and forever changed you. Places, people.

Something breaks that will never again be joined.

A primal departure. One of those moments when you see life from the viewpoint of death, our mortality: the thought that I will never see that person again, that place again -- until I die, until you die.

That it will be too late, when you remember and regret.


No consolation for this, no hindsight.

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