Dreadful Departures

Reluctance, sadness, acute nostalgia—they grip me as I finally say goodbye to you. We have been together for eight years. Eight ripe years! Given the shelf-life of Hollywood marriages our shared number of years together borders on the naïveté and endurance of old fashioned romance. So it is with pinch of melancholy that I will be moving on, leaving you behind. I felt the wave of embarrassment floating up my nose like a flagrant lover diminished of gratitude and devotion.

Farewell 25th floor, Unit (X).

As I move many many floors up, I glance sideways and I can see, lucidly, as if for the first time, speckles of stories soaked by your fading walls. Beautiful stories, heartbreaking stories, carnal stories, insane stories, hilarious stories, tender stories, and stories laced with secrets, malice and lust. I will carry every unwritten word of these memories with me.

When I finally close the door, and twist the knobs to seal your emptied rooms for the last time all these fond remembrances will come rushing back like ignited fireflies swarming a tree branch in the calmness of midnight.

I will remember the struggles I’ve had some years back when I was in-between jobs. Those bleak times of pork and beans and toasted bread weeks in a row because I was too proud to call home to bail me out.

I will remember tossing and turning past three in the morning either pining over a beloved or outwitting the potent spells of insomnia over difficult deadlines that make me have self-doubts about my professional worth.

I will remember casual encounters and the rush of guilt and regret when morning arrives and my lungs are reminded of stale sex clinging on the sheets.

I will remember quiet moments when I lay on my back on the cold parquet, staring at the ceiling with very soft music soaking the deep joys of solitude.

I will remember the excruciating moments when editing the perpetually growing number of books, CDs, DVDs, magazines that spill over the shelves and the agonizing option paralysis over what to cast out and what to keep.

I will remember the accidental brushes with voyeurism when I flung the canvass curtains open and beheld the next-door neighbours fucking like crazed rabbits with their lights burning bright and their windows wide-ajar like the legs of a two-dollar whore.

I cannot even begin to imagine the copious volumes of books I can write about our time together and maybe, if things conspire to be so permitting I may start that first page.

Such is life, though. We have to embrace even the most awkward of changes. But life itself cannot expunge these memories. Memories define us. They will sit quietly, waiting for the precise opportunity to spring back to mind and unfold a smile upon our face.

Farewell 25th Floor, Unit (X). It is my fondest wish that your new occupants will dwell in you with deep affection in the same manner you have been kind to me in the rich expanse of those eight beautiful years.