the return clause

on being very good at leaving, right up until I wasn't

I’ve never actually left a place in my life. I’ve moved a lot, eight times if you count the first one, but left, really left, the kind where you know you’re not going back, I’ve somehow never once done that. What I do instead is pause it… I get on the plane and I tell myself the city will keep, that the apartment and the streets and the people are all just sitting there on hold, and that whenever I feel like it I can go back and press play and find the whole thing exactly how I left it, me included. Peru at eighteen was the first one, affter that it went Miami, then LA, then New York, then Mexico, then New York again, then Paris, then back to New York and then LA during the pandemic, roughly every five years, always the big bombastic version of it, the kind where you land somewhere that has no idea who you are with two suitcases and just start. I was good at it, great, really. For the longest time I thought that was restlessness, some itch I was born with, but it wasn’t. It was that leaving never actually cost me anything, because in my head I could always take it back.

The movers left half an hour ago and I’m standing in the middle of what used to be the living room, and it turns out the eighth time is the one I can’t take back. The couch is gone, the art is down off the walls, and without any of it the room doesn’t know us anymore, it’s just a shape with some afternoon light in it that could belong to anybody. There are pale squares on the wall where the frames used to hang, a little cleaner than the paint around them, and a dent in the carpet the exact size of the couch that sat there for years, and that’s more or less all that’s left of us in here. You don’t realize how much of a home is just the things in it until you watch two men carry the things out to a truck.

I’ve started calling it the return clause.This thing I always assumed was written into every move even though I never read it anywhere and nobody ever signed it, that nothing I walked away from was really gone, just paused, still mine to come back to whenever. And I think I got away with believing it because time never seemed to add up on me. Five years in one city, 5 in the next, but as long as I kept moving it pooled somewhere behind me and I stayed whatever age I was in my own head. The cities changed…I didn’t, or I couldn’t feel myself change, which felt like the same thing at the time

And then you have kids, and the clause quietly runs out, and nobody hands you the paperwork. It’s got nothing to do with the house, it’s them. Watching a kid grow is pretty violent, how fast it goes, and it makes time visible in a way it never was on me, because I can’t feel myself age, it’s too slow, but a person shows up at zero and is suddenly one and then somehow three, right in front of me, bigger ( & louder!) every single year, and time stops being a thing I get to avoid. They’re the first clock I’ve ever been able to watch. And once you see it you can’t unsee the rest, which is that I don’t get to come back here, not really, because the little kid who lives in this house right now won’t exist by the time I could, he’ll be some bigger boy I haven’t met yet , lovely I’m sure… but gone in the exact way I’d want to come back for

I brought Phoenix ( my 2nd ) home to this house, and this is where he turned into a person, in the little room down the hall with a view of the pool, the bassinet parked on my side of the bed for those first blurry months

He got bigger and eventually moved in with Atlas, the two of them crammed happily into one room, and his old room just sat there empty. I never turned it into anything else, never decorated over it, in my mind, it became hers. Because I moved into this house pregnant with Phoenix and underneath everything I was so sure I’d have a third one here too…I could see her so clearly, so I kept everything, every little thing from both boys washed and boxed , plus a whole separate stash of tiny vintage clothes I’d been collecting only for her, for a girl who didn’t live anywhere except in that empty room I couldn’t bring myself to put anything else in. And the new house doesn’t have a spare one, there’s nowhere to put her, so leaving here isn’t only leaving the house, it’s the part where I finally stop holding the door open for someone who might never come. I watched two guys carry the last of it out of that room and it just went back to being just a room, and I couldn’t get my head around how fast a place goes from holding the biggest maybe of your life to holding nothing at all

I don’t know if what’s happening in my body right now is grief or hormones ( yay perimenopause !) or just the wreckage of the IVF cycles that didn’t take, and I’ve decided I don’t have to file it under anything, because the part of me that wants a label is the same part that wants to pack all of this into a box and be done. That part goes looking for the lesson. Last week I woke up at three in the morning with a full blown panic attack: did I give up too soon? am i quitting right before the miracle? am I the one closing the door, where was she supposed to go!? I never fell back asleep, I just lay there in the dark waiting for an answer that never came. I didn't have anything to say back at three and I still don't… The room empties out the same either way

I packed the way I always pack, which is to say the clothes are what I actually carry. They come out of the boxes in the next place more or less how they went in, the same as they were in New York, in Paris, a version of me I can fold flat and take anywhere. Everything else stays and turns into the before-photo in someone else’s life. I used to call that freedom. What I didn’t get, back when it was just me and two suitcases and nothing to lose, is that the clothes are only easy to carry because they don’t change. The two boys in the back of the car are the reason I can’t travel light anymore, and they’re also the only thing I’d keep exactly as it is tonight if anyone would let me, which is the one thing you don’t get to do, you can’t fold a stage of a kid into a suitcase and you can’t leave a version of them paused in a house and come back for them later.

Every other place I left, I left thinking I could come back to it...that was always the deal. This time there's no coming back, and not because of the house, I could walk back into the house in five years, it'll just be white and somebody else's by then, even the red-and-purple room the boys watched their shows in, it's that the boys will never be this small in it again…. I was never good at leaving; I was just good at not really doing it