  Things were weird, just strange. Leaving is such a bazaar act, taking months to plan it, weeks to solidify and let go of relationships, friendships, the slow changing process. Sometimes I want it to be quick and easy, pain-free, like a five year old pulling off a sticky band aid.
I carry the weight of this city, my place here, my leaving, my relationships, on my sturdy legs, leaving my ankles throbbing as I lay in bed, alone. They are swollen with experience, lessons learned, and early morning runs up Mt. Tabor, which might as well be the highest mountain in the world at 6AM. The process is so much of an emotional process that I am left exhausted at the end of the day, unable to place where my energy has gone, realize that I've been spreading it across Portland, blanketing the city in as much of me as I can let go of so that it'll remember me when I want to come back.
So that I won't be a foreigner here, that I'll be able to call it home if I choose it again. So that I'll have friends to come back to, a neighborhood where I was once a regular. I dance in a club too late on a Wednesday, spin, glide, laugh, follow, trip, smile. I step and twirl and fly through the early hours of the morning, leaving a piece of me on the floor, while the remnants slowly drive my tired bones home, I collapse into bed with throbbing feet, wake up too soon smelling like men, sweat, tasting the sweet salt of my life. I drink thick beer in smoky bars with supportive friends. We shoot darts in crooked waves towards the bull’s eye. We shoot pool and smile while we question our skill vs. luck. Pitchers are finished, stroll happily home, and as I doze off to sleep, I suck in the cool night air that seeps into my window and I howl at the moon. I sit on my front porch smoking cigarettes, people watching, chatting, and saying nothing with my wise-for-her-years friend.
The hours pass slowly, the evening is timeless until her husband calls, offers to pick her up. We delight in the next hour as dusk cloaks us with a light mist. Then I’m left alone with the evening, and me and the night have endless romantic hours as we stroll through time, my neighborhood and go home together and fall asleep with our bodies luxuriously tangled.
I sleep and absorb energy from the full moon that lights up my room in the dark. And the days keep coming, demanding more and more of me, and I open up and pour my heart again onto the streets, into the people in silent goodbyes. I dive into this city, let it swallow me whole. When we're through swimming through the spring together, it'll spit me back out, and I'll land alone in a foreign country, to start the home-making process again. Friendless, language-less, eyes wide open, vulnerable and searching for where I may belong in a place I may not belong at all. My goodbye tears are sweet, decadent streams that I would not trade for anything. I created these rivers of emotion, and I'll ride the rapids and know they could never dry up for good. 
