staying long

ties, roots, and other methods of binding

‘You never stay long, do you?’ A joking tone, an undercurrent of judgment. Always the same when I visit my childhood home, fleetingly, leaving like a migratory bird for warmer climates, sprawling out across the earth like a plant without roots. I stand in my old bedroom like a ghost without an agenda. I have no business here.

Something set my chest on fire as I was growing up. Something torched the land. I kept burning all those years, and anyone who got too close to me inhaled my secondhand smoke. It wasn’t safe to be around me for too long. I was noxious to the end of avoiding being harmed myself. I had trouble recognising when to stay, but I always knew when to leave.

I’ve had the same problem since leaving home, too. I study in more than one city, I leave the country, I return, I change career path, I switch company, I live in the city centre, I move to the suburbs. I keep one foot on the pedal, one wing in the sky. Each time I look in the same mirror my face is different.

I’m one of the only people I know who genuinely loves packing. Weeks, sometimes months, before a trip, I start gathering things to pack. My bedroom becomes covered in piles of clothes, mini hygiene and beauty products, jewellery and good luck trinkets. Even better if I’m moving somewhere for a while, or indefinitely — even more piles to gather, belongings to throw out or decide will change my life. I can’t stop anything, including myself, from changing. So why not embrace it? Why not choose the items that represent me the most at that specific point in time, pack what I think will best prepare me for the life I’m seeking in another place? Packing is a view to a future you: a selection of things that tell you who you could be. The place I was determined who I could be for so many years. Now I am free to go anywhere — so I can be anyone. Right?

Four walls have never held me. I used to see the stars in my room at night. The sun would swallow my ceiling in the mornings. To me, staying in one place is like screwing the lid on the container. It will never be final. I can always unscrew the lid.

Then I met you.

You brought me something calm and peaceful, germinative, like late summer downpour, capable of reviving the scorched earth in my chest. Your love feels like a deep breath in. It looks like copied keys on the counter. It invites the world inside and doesn’t make me go out to search for it.

A lifetime staying still doesn’t scare me as much if it’s with you. You’ve become the antidote to my restlessness. Time never passed so slowly than in the years we spent apart. The four years since have been the fastest by far. How can I reconcile love with the passage of time? How do we jostle forever into a lifetime? I think it’s what I said before: I think it’s that we have to stay still. Please, don’t leave. Please,

stay long.