let me stay here awhile

there is something to be said for knowing how to leave. i do it well. i can feel when a time has ended (or at least when i'm through). everything in me flatlines and i look to the horizon. i move on. but usually the disengagement has begun sometime before, in this case, a year plus before.

the buddhists say,

once the decision is made there is no struggle.

i have found that always to be so. i labored over that decision, put off making it for a year, an entire year. until, at last, i could not bear it any longer. by then, i was done. everything had gone dry. there was no unused reserve to draw upon. it was time, some would say (in fact, many have, past time). and so, when the time came it was effortless. leaving for me, usually is. aside from all the practical bullshit. the actual dismantling of lives together. that is effortless for no one, i'm convinced.

what i want to learn now, is how to stay. to settle in. to engage in the lives of those around me with no intention of leaving. like i do with my child. i will not be parted from that one, even if miles separate us some day. i will be in her life. regardless.

but i'm speaking here of a quality of engagement i've not acquired in my life.

driving around her neighborhood with her mom, they pointed out where she grew up. basically the same town. i have never known anything like that. i've been a nomad my entire life. perhaps this is my nature, my ancestry. but i don't think so.

i'm pueblo. village dwellers. adobe and such. cultivators.

i'm stumped by it, really. i guess, being that up until 1998, i averaged a home every two years, it might be more than just my will at play here. i was not the decision maker in most, if not all of those instances of moving, though i did move a few times of my own accord when i was a teen and going to college. i jumped ship on my ex a while ago, and now have lived in two different places.

my heart still aches for roots.

my neighbor, whom i love, said to me recently,

you come and go. staying largely apart from the dramas that go on here.

and i do, it is how i live, on the move. but she said,

i have to be here.

i understand that. or want to.

mind you, i've never been happier. never experienced more joy, more freedom than now. the thing about it is, i want to experience it with those i love. but what does that mean. my family is on the west coast. i cannot live there, they irriate me (and likely, i them). so, the world is my orphanage, i am free to roam and call wherever i choose, my home. the only thing is, i have this little girl, this fellow wanderer beside me. i don't want to disrupt her life, (though i already have) the way mine was disrupted. though this past weekend when we were laughing and enjoying ourselves and our host, it felt good.

she has you, that's all that matters,

i'm told.

it would seem selfish of me not to consider the ramifications of relocation on her, but at the same time, i can't not move forward because my little one has friends at school. though i hate for her to lose connection, life happens. that cannot be avoided. in fact, sometimes the good must be sacrificed for the best.

she's starting high school next year and i hope to be somewhere she can do all four years without disruption. that's not too much to ask, is it? to see her through an entire run of one school?

i tell her,

sometimes a fresh start isn't so bad. it's helpful. you can be anyone you want.

and you can. i understand this, i have done it my entire life.

but there is never that certainty of knowing a place. a land. a home.

that, i would not know.