The Leaving

Before the years away there was the leaving, and the leaving had its own long shape. The school years on the Bay had ended in a small gallery on the lake shore, a solo show that gathered the people who mattered into one room, boxed wine and borrowed music and the whole of it his. It was the culmination, five years of study and thousands of studio hours arriving at a table of old friends and family, and it was also the last thing that held him to the place. After the room emptied he knew he could not stay.

He did not leave in one act. He wore a path into it, driving the corridor west and back again all that summer as if testing whether a person could become something else by crossing the same distance enough times. In between he slept a month on a couch in the back of the college printshop, evading the night guard, making work until dawn because there was nothing else to do and nothing left to lose. It was the place that had saved him, and he was, technically, homeless inside it, and the art came easier for having nothing under him.

The road west had to be bought. He sold off a hoard of small built things he had spent his twenties collecting, every one hunted down and opened and set on a shelf, for the cash that funded the move. He sat afterward in an empty house with the money on the table and the rooms echoing, and it looked like proof of practicality and felt like a quiet trade, something given up for something not yet in hand. You do not learn until later how many small endings make up a beginning. Then he pointed the car at the mill cities and went.