It’s inevitable that I leave. It’s what I do. Sometimes I want to leave, sometimes I have to – but I always go. And I exist between those decisions to walk away – like a game of connect-the-dots. Everything that I leave is everything that defines me – the people, the cities, streets, cafes, windows, stairs, bridges, and park benches. I am all of these things that I love to remember.
I first left home when I was eighteen. I moved from the kelly green cornfields of rural Iowa to the cold, frantic streets of New York City. I left the house that I was born and raised in. It’s the house with the cement basement I used to roller skate in. My bedroom door slammed when the front door opened every morning as my dad left for work smelling like aftershave and Listerine. We had our Christmas tree in the room on the far left with the grand piano and black and white photos of my ancient relatives. I left that house, my older brother, younger sister and parents with two suitcases. I took the low ceiling from my bedroom, the smell of my mom’s perfume, the lilac bush from the front yard, the apple tree from the back yard and the way my dad’s beard scratched when he kissed my cheek.
I spent four years in New York City studying and wandering the streets. It smelled different from my home in Iowa – more like exhaust fumes than my mom’s cooking. It wasn’t as comfortable as Iowa and definitely not as friendly. But New York became my new home. I had a dysfunctional relationship with that city but there was love. I loved all the languages that filled the streets as I walked around, I loved the energy, I loved that New York is a city filled with dreamers and doers, and I love the Brooklyn Bridge. When I walked the bridge and stared out at the East River, I saw the Iowa River layered on top of it like I used to see from the pedestrian bridge in Iowa City. The East River would swallow up the Iowa River, but that’s inevitable. I took both of them with me when I left New York and I took some Chinese take-out, I took my closest friends, a Magnolia cupcake, the vintage bookstores, and the four-mile loop I loved to run in Central Park.
Istanbul, Turkey became my next home where I taught English, smoked too many cigarettes and, again, wandered the streets. When I stood at the edge of the Bosphorus River and watched the cars crawl across the Bosphorus Bridge, I saw the Brooklyn Bridge on top of it, and the pedestrian bridge in Iowa on top of that one. The waters swirled with the three rivers that I’d stood over and at one time called home. After a year, I left Istanbul but from it I took that bridge and those waters, I took the ancient, crumbling stairs outside of my apartment, and the toothless man in the corner store, and I took the smells and sounds of the streets like the shouting Boza man who passed my window at 9pm every night.
There have been many places in between and during New York and Istanbul. The chaotic and radiant colors of Bombay where the moaning streets sang me to sleep at night. A 24-hour prayer house in Innsbruck, Austria where a nun and I sat in silence together until the sun came up the next morning. The train journey in Italy I took with my closest friend through Tuscany to Florence where we emerged in sweaty clothes with an appetite for nothing but gelato and wine. The rainy streets of Paris that I ran through with my sister shouting phrases in French that we’d heard in the movies on the plane ride over. All of these places color the filter through which I see the world. I bring it all with me; every person, every street, bridge, window, every staircase, and slamming door. And when I go back to Iowa, when I pull into that driveway where my dad would spend Saturday mornings blowing the snow into piles along the side, I bring them with me there, too, and it becomes new. All the apartments I’ve lived in, now live inside that house in Iowa. That pedestrian bridge has walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and together they’ve stared at the Bosphorus Bridge, and all the other bridges that I’ve been to. All that I have been becomes all that I will be.
Maybe in order to change and grow, we must remember. Maybe in order to remember, we must keep moving, leaving. Perhaps the best way to keep present all that is absent is to go somewhere new. Every time I step on a plane, I’m back on that American Airlines plane that took me from my childhood home to my new life in New York City. Every time I walk across a bridge, I am over the East River with Lady Liberty in the distance and New York City just ahead of me. Every time I leave, I return home.
