Today I walked in to a cafe to sit and read and write a bit. I’m clearly not blogging every day, and I’m not even writing off site every day. Trying to meet new people has taken up a lot of my time, so has going out to eat, and listening to bands. I still think of my ex-fiancee every day. I still miss her terribly. I still sometimes think the universe will somehow bring us back together. But, I think I’ve tired of writing about it. I think I’ve just about punched myself out of it. I’m not ready to date yet. I don’t want to meet anyone else, other than to have someone to hang out with. As I meet new people (I’ve been hanging with a cool woman named Stacy who took me to an art auction), I ask myself, will B like this person?
But that’s not the point of this post… As I sat at the cafe, I tried to think about what I wanted to write about. I wanted to write a poem about my recent experience of leaving home. I wanted to capture the duality that an empty house represents – sad emptiness (void of memories) for the person leaving. Exciting emptiness, a clean slate for the people moving in. I wanted to talk about being the last one to leave, the one who has to turn the lights out. I wanted to capture what it was like to drive away, that whole rear view mirror moment. I was trying to think about and describe the lonesome echo of walking into the house one last time, going room to room and seeing nothing but some dust on the floors. I was trying to imagine how to describe how the late October sun felt on my face as I stood in the driveway.
The words wouldn’t come to me. So I read some poems about leaving home. Philip Larkin’s “Home is so Sad” hit pretty hard – I liked the lines “And turn again to what it started as,/ A joyous shot at how things ought to be,” I also read the poems “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe, and “The Afternoon Sun” by C.P. Cavafy.
It was heady stuff – I can’t delve in to these subjects without thinking about the home I had hoped to build with my ex-fiancee, B. I read Howe’s lines:
But there are moments, walking , when I catch a
glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and
I’m gripped by a cherishing so deepfor my own blowing hair, chapped face, and
unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
I can’t read that and not think of how B hated the cold of Philly, or not imagine her catching a glimpse of herself in the window glass, her red hair under her cap. It’s a strange thing when you commit yourself fully to someone else. You frame so much of your world in their eyes. You start to think almost as two people. And so even in trying to write about or read about leaving home, I’m haunted by this life we had, and the life we gave up on far too soon.