On Leaving a Place

When I left home for college nearly eight years ago, I imagined that my life was opening. I was moving away from the familiar—away from what, at that time, felt inhibiting, and entering into a new and seemingly bigger space. Ironically, I was really moving to a smaller town, yet for me Mt. Pleasant symbolized an opportunity to realize my own grand ideas. 

Having been here so long, this all seems rather silly. I now see this place as something very different. A space that embodies, for me, a sense of limitation. I reconcile this with the clear knowledge of what I have gained here internally—A focused and profound sense of self. Revelations I could have only gained through the exploration of grand ideas and the construction (or better: reconstruction) of my own. 

The process of leaving a space can be troubling. The knowledge that I am (more than) ready to depart is sufficient, yet the physical process of sorting through a near decade of residue evokes a surprising sense of loss. A few weeks ago, my grandmother, upon entering my garage-home, remarked, "you're going to miss this," to which I promptly responded, "No. I don't think I will." But as I look around my rustic, upper-Michiganesque living-space, I note the trees and the solitude, the long, stupid driveway I get stuck in every winter, and the way the sun shines in on the catchild napping in my bed. And here I find a new appreciation for it, now built it into my permanent memories—a private space in which I both realized and relinquished so many things.

When I think of cities, I think of exceedingly large, brick and mortar, built spaces. Skyscrapers. Public transportation. Masses of people. Rarely do I consider the small, enclosed "city" I've been longing to leave behind. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau examines the symbolic mediums that comprise a culture—behaviors and rituals reappropriated that construct the everyday. In "Walking in the City" he describes how walking though a city is the "spatial acting-out of the place." Movement, in other words, constructs its presence and meaning. "Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others aren't allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded, but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body." This, he says, is spatial practice. One's relationship to a place exists fundamentally in the ghostly memories of (now) absent symbols.

I've walked through this place many times, rarely thinking of what it is and often resenting what it isn't. But it has given and I have received. Its lackluster presence has provided presence of mind, and thus my own internal self-creation. And now it's time to release, to walk through new, more difficult spaces. To continue evolving, creating, and honing myself from the inside out. I'm grateful for it.