When You’re Ready to Disappear, Things Lose Their Importance
Holding an empty bag, I enter my bedroom like a thief – just a change of clothes and a toothbrush, and I’m free. When you’re ready to disappear, things lose their importance. You dream of the future. You dream of new things.
I look around a room filled with secrets, and I leave them all behind.
The television turns on in the next room. Maybe I won’t make it out? Yes, I will. I will go out that door and feel the warm air of a perfect summer’s night. I am leaving this place, this life, who you wanted me to be. I’m sorry I could never be that for you.
I will start again and become new, but first, I’ll have to pull you off me, mother.
Pry you away. I wish it didn’t have to be this way. I wish you could let me go. Help me go. Help me, mother. Help me pack. Wish me luck. Give me the strength to go out there. It’s a big world, mama. I will be in it all alone. I look around my room. I pack just enough to carry. I don’t need much, just my freedom.
You didn’t even know I left. I never told you. I just walked out the door with that one bag. There was so little to take.
Out on the street, I feel the summer breeze. Beyond the curve at the end of the road lies my future. There’s no turning back now. I see broken pieces of chalk scattered on the sidewalk. I kick one, and it goes flying. I begin to run, feeling the wind against my skin. From a distance, I watch myself disappear at the street’s bend.
But this is not where the story ends. There was more to it than my freedom. There was so much more to it than that one bag with nothing much in it. I left you that day. I emptied myself of you.
This story is both true and not true. Both real and imagined. Mine and yet not mine. All these different elements came together through Creative Experiencing, a process by which we can step into the liminal in-between spaces and go beyond our experience to find meaning. Through Creative Experiencing, we can transcend time and combine all the different layers of experience. We can find ways to tell our stories and provide ourselves with deep release.
Creative Experiencing can forge a pathway to the people and places we left, not because we want to do it but because we have no choice but to do it, to hold together all the broken pieces of that wanting.
Have you ever been in a situation where you had to leave a place even though you didn’t want to?
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