I have left many places. I have left them well and poorly and in a hurry and with great deliberation, and I have been studying the practice long enough to have some opinions about it. This is not a how-to guide. This is more in the nature of a field report from someone who has made leaving a subspecialty, if not quite a vocation.
Let me begin with what I know for certain.
The first thing I know is that the decision to leave is almost never made at the moment you think it is. You believe you decide on a particular Tuesday, sitting in your car outside a building you can no longer go into, that it is time to go. But that decision was made months earlier, maybe years, in small rooms you have since forgotten. The Tuesday is just when you let yourself hear it.
I left my first city the summer I turned twenty-four. I had lived there for three years, which is long enough to belong to a place but not long enough to be owned by it. I left because a person I had loved very much was still there and loving them had become a kind of staying, and I needed to find out whether I had any shape of my own independent of theirs. I drove away on a morning when the fog was so thick the bridge disappeared. I took this as instruction.
The second thing I know is that you will take more with you than you intend.
This is not about the boxes. The boxes are the easy part — you will be ruthless with the boxes, you will give things away with a generosity that surprises you, and you will feel briefly wonderful about this, and then you will arrive in the new place and discover that you have brought the particular quality of light from the kitchen of your old apartment, and the sound the pipes made, and the way you felt in the mornings before you were fully awake. These things travel in you. There is no way to leave them behind because they are not in the boxes. They are in the body.
The city I live in now is my fourth. I have lived in a harbour town, a valley city, a capital, and now here — a mid-sized place with a river running through the centre of it and a particular atmospheric quality in winter that I have come to find very beautiful. I have learned the rhythm of this city: when the markets open, where the light is best at four in the afternoon, which streets feel safe at midnight and which do not. I have learned to love it in the specific, contingent way you can only love a place once you have also been disappointed by it.
But I still dream, sometimes, of the harbour.
The third thing I know about leaving — and this is the one that took me longest to understand — is that leaving is always also an arrival.
This seems obvious when stated plainly, but we don't usually experience it that way. Leaving tends to feel terminal in the moment, like an ending without a corresponding beginning, and this is because we process departure in a kind of emotional slow motion. The new place takes time to become real. For weeks or months after a significant leaving, you exist in a state of suspension — present in the new place but not yet of it, like a photograph still developing, the image there but not yet fixed.
I have come to value this state, in retrospect. The suspension is uncomfortable, yes. You feel provisional, unmoored, insufficiently real. But you are also, during this period, free of the accumulated weight of being known. You are nobody's anything, in the new place. You can be quiet in a way that feels chosen rather than imposed. You can walk streets that have no memories attached to them yet and experience something very close to pure attention.
This is rare. Most of us live most of our lives in places thick with the residue of our own past, every corner annotated. The freedom of the unknown street is a freedom we mostly only know when we are between things.
The fourth thing I know is that regret is not the same as grief, but they share a grammar.
I have regretted some of my leavings. Not all of them — most of the major ones I stand behind, even when I can see what I lost. But there was a place once, a small apartment above a bookshop in a city I will not name, where I lived for nine months and was happier than I had any reason to expect, and I left it because a better opportunity opened elsewhere and because I was twenty-nine years old and the habit of moving had already calcified into a kind of ideology. I told myself I was a person who moved. I told myself that staying would be surrender.
I think about that apartment sometimes. The way the light came through the narrow windows in the late afternoon. The smell of old books drifting up through the floorboards. The baker across the street, who was already at work when I walked to the café each morning, and whose particular attention to his own task — the deliberate, absorbed quality of it — I found I could watch for several minutes without boredom.
I don't know what I would have become if I had stayed. That is the trouble with the roads not taken: they remain entirely theoretical, and the imagination tends to furnish them very generously.
What I do know is this. The places we leave do not stop existing when we leave them. They continue without us, accumulating their own small histories, acquiring new residents, changing in ways we will never know. And sometimes — on evenings when the light does something unexpected, or when a smell finds you in an unexpected place, or when you are very tired and your defenses are low — you feel the tug of them. A kind of gravity. The accumulated weight of all the places that have held you pulling gently in the direction of the past.
I have learned to recognize this feeling without being controlled by it. It is not unhappiness. It is something more like the particular ache of a wide life — evidence that you have been in enough places to miss more than one of them at once.
The last thing I know about leaving, and the most important, is that it is fundamentally an act of faith.
To leave is to believe that there is something worth moving toward. Even when the leaving is driven by necessity, or pain, or the simple exhaustion of being somewhere too long, there is embedded in the act a kind of stubborn optimism — a refusal to believe that what you have already had is all that is available to you. This is not always warranted. The new place is sometimes worse. The new beginning is sometimes not a beginning at all. You arrive and discover that what you were leaving was not the city but yourself, and yourself has come along.
But you don't know that in advance. And so you go.
You load the boxes into the car. You drive away through the fog. The bridge disappears behind you.
You keep going.
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There is a footnote I have been saving.
Some years after I left the harbour town, I went back. I had not planned to. I was passing through on other business, and I had several hours between a train and a meeting, and I thought: why not. I walked the old neighbourhood. I found the street, the building, the café where I had spent so many mornings. The café was still there. The building had new paint. The street was the same street.
I sat at a window table and ordered a coffee and tried to feel something useful.
What I felt, mostly, was the strangeness of scale — the way the places that shaped us are usually much smaller than they exist in memory. The street was shorter than I remembered. The room above the café, when I glimpsed it from outside, had an ordinary window. The world I had left, which had seemed so large, was actually just a street. Just a window. Just a room where a younger version of me had been afraid and lonely and, on the better days, genuinely alive.
I paid for the coffee. I walked back to the train.
The leaving, I understood then, was not the event I had spent years making of it. It was a Tuesday morning. A car, a fog, a bridge. The story I had built around it — the significance, the lessons, the careful taxonomy of everything I had learned — was mine. The city had not noticed. The city was always just a city. It is always us who make the leaving mean something.
This is either consoling or frightening, depending on what you need.
I have found it, on the whole, to be both.