How to Move Away

It's best to wake early, four, five a.m., while the neighbors sleep and the moon floats like a pearl in a pool of ink. In half-light the empty house is less familiar, less sad—the walls with their nail holes, the carpet—its patterns of wear, curtains with no job to do. I sit on my suitcase, eat powdered donuts; a napkin for a plate, juice out of a paper cup. Make one last check of the cupboards, the drawers. Run my hand along the countertops, the stair rail, trace the walls with my fingertips, each scar proof of my childhood, my initials carved into the tree of this, our sixth house. My family could write a Handbook for Leaving— the way we pack up during summer solstice, disconnect from people and places like an abrupt shutting off of electricity. My father's convinced himself that the unknown is always better, the way the retina sees images upside down and the brain corrects. Here I smoked candy cigarettes, my breath in winter passing for smoke, pale green of my bedroom. I counted the number of intersections on the way to school (four). I bundle memories together, weight them with stones like unwanted kittens drowned in a creek. What kind of animal constantly moves? The point of migration is the return. We're nomads without the base knowledge of where to find water. These moves are like arranged marriages; economics now, love later. Maybe it's not against nature to move. Most of the body is no more than ten years old and blood renews itself every 90 days. But leaving disturbs the fabric of a place. I'd rather stay and witness change. My mother always wanting to plant perennials that we never stay to see. I pour some water on the marigolds clattering around the mailbox, Aztec flowers of death, their strong scent a beacon to lost souls. Then we drive away, the blank windows like the blank eyes of the dead, waiting for someone to seal the past with a penny.