After Leaving My Old Life ...

Have you done it? I have. Many times.

I’m a sucker for any poem (or short story or novel or essay) that begins “After leaving my old life …”

Because I have left my old life so many times.

Kind people call this reinvention.

Exasperated people simply call it “leaving” — and who can say they are wrong? Technically accurate. Still, there is so much more in the decision(s) to leave a life and start a new one.

But this isn’t a time to go into the minutiae of decisions (no matter how accurate or substantiated those reasons may be) because each moment of leaving rests on exactly one realization:

This is not the life I want to live.

And that’s enough.

That singular point is enough for a human being to pick up their one and only life, toss it on their back like a hobo sack and move towards a place where they can breathe freely.

And here, dear reader, I apologize in advance to all those who will howl about the trauma, the loss, the wake of a major upheaval, the flotsam and jetsam left in the trailing edges of the rushing water of change while the bird is aloft, having taken flight to save itself.

They are right about the flooding. But so am I about the saving.