Move across the country and hope the Sadness won’t find you, won’t follow you like a stray dog from country to country. Hope the Sadness isn’t just a dog on a leash, shadowing you always. Hope the Sadness can’t be as exaggerated as you are, hope the Sadness is more rooted. Perhaps the Sadness has friends, and a family, and can’t just pick up and go. Look at all this stuff the Sadness has accumulated wherever you are currently living. How’s the Sadnessd going to survive without all this stuff? Hope this isn’t one of those any-place-I-hang-my-hat-is-home-type situations where the Sadness hangs its hat on you. Hope that you are not the Sadness’s home, anywhere you go, no matter how far, no matter how quickly – the Sadness lives in you.
Move across the country, to another country and start a new adventure. Always big adventures. Create a brand-new life, buy a new set of furniture, a fresh autumn coat. Fill your day with distraction. Take a class, learn an instrument, visit your local library and crack open one of those books you always meant to get acquainted with, anything to make the days pass faster, to accumulate distance, to get you as far away as possible from the place that you left. Move across the country and watch the road signs shoot past you along the street. See the city recede in the distance behind the taped-up boxes obstructing your rearview. Settle somewhere fertile, plant a new you and watch you blossom. You can barely remember that old you now, the you who lived in that other place and was Sad. The old you wasn’t you; this is you. This is the you! The new you! The you always wanted to be.
You have friends now, a routine, a coffee shop where someone, as you saunter in, smiles and says, “The usual?” One night at a bar, late, you pick up a person that somehow grows into a habit – a person who gets to know not just the you you sometimes show, but the you you truly are; a person who – when you weren’t looking – slipped a naked, wounded heart into the pocket of your jacket with a bow and a note that said, “handle with care.”
One night, you will wake with a start in this person’s bed, you will discover yourself in this person’s arms, and you will disentangle yourself for the hundredth time and dress yourself for the hundredth time and try to leave this person’s apartment, but when you get to the door there will be a sticky note over the knob that says, “but what if this time you stayed?”
And you will turn around and get back into that person’s bed, and you will get back into that person’s arms, and you will stay there for a year and a half. And you will learn how to be very, very tender with that person’s naked, wounded heart. Or is it your heart that is wounded? That was wounded all along? What are you searching for? What are you running away from?
And when the Sadness catches up, tracks you down – when you return home one day, arms full of groceries, to find the Sadness sitting at the kitchen table, casually reading a paper as if it never left, eating a muffin as if this were all perfectly natural- when the Sadness looks up at you and says, “What did you think, buddy? What did you think was going to happen?” – when the Sadness smirks at you and says with a wry insistence that unravels you in an instant, “This is the real love story here, buddy, you and me”. When the Sadness reiterates that, sure, certain smaller sadnesses dull, but this Sadness, the Sadness has never stayed from your side, not really, this epitome of stability in an inconsistent world? The sadness will always catch up to you and when that happens, you can put your groceries down and walk back out the door again to close the door behind you. And run away. As you always do. Off to a new adventure.
You can keep driving until you hit a HELP WANTED sign dangling off the edge of the new country you want to explore. You can take the new job and get all your stuff shipped out to you or throw it in the river or burn it in a fire or donate it. Go for the hike along the water and breathe in the fresh sea air. Move across the country and start again someplace new or just stop and simply look within. The answer might be right there. Just look and listen. No need to go anywhere.
