The Shape of Leaving

Everything we love eventually teaches us about leaving.

A season ends.

A song finishes.

A child grows taller.

A house becomes someone else’s house.

Even a good afternoon eventually becomes a memory.

We usually call this loss.

Sometimes it is.

But leaving is not always the same thing as disappearing.

A person can leave a room and remain in your thoughts.

A teacher can leave your life and remain in the way you think.

A parent can die and still be present in the sentences you learned from them.

A friend can move across the world and still make you laugh at something nobody else understands.

Things leave their original shape.

They do not necessarily leave the world.

This is true of us too.

The body changes constantly.

Cells arrive.

Cells leave.

The person you were ten years ago is not the person sitting here now.

And yet somehow there is continuity.

A thread running through changing cloth.

We don’t know exactly what that thread is.

Memory?

Identity?

Consciousness?

Story?

Something deeper?

I don’t know.

Death makes the question impossible to avoid.

And here, perhaps, we should resist the temptation to make promises.

Maybe there is something afterward.

Maybe consciousness continues in a way we cannot presently understand.

Maybe there is nothing.

Maybe reality is stranger than either answer.

We don’t know.

But we do know this:

while we are here, we touch things.

We change them.

They change us.

A person can die and leave kindness behind.

A writer can die and leave words.

A parent can die and leave habits in a child.

A stranger can hold a door open once, and that tiny act can become part of someone’s memory for decades.

We are constantly leaving pieces of ourselves behind without noticing.

Perhaps that is one of the quiet truths of being alive.

You are temporary.

So is everything around you.

And temporary does not mean meaningless.

A fire does not become worthless because it goes out.

A song does not become worthless because it ends.

A life does not become worthless because it cannot last forever.

Maybe impermanence is not the opposite of meaning.

Maybe it is part of what gives meaning its shape.

So we can grieve what leaves.

We can miss it.

We can say:

I wish you were still here.

And we do not have to solve that feeling.

Some doors are allowed to remain closed.

Some goodbyes are simply goodbyes.

We can still carry what was given to us.

And perhaps, someday, someone else will carry something we left behind.

Fancy Dust is particularly good at this.

It gets everywhere.

You can never quite find all of it.

Perhaps that is the point.

Not everything needs to stay.

Some things are meant to travel.

Some things are meant to change.

Some things are meant to be remembered.

And some things—

we simply let go.