This section starts with a quote from Hunter S. Thompson. It’s about taking flight, in more ways than one.One of the most beautiful lines ever written in six words is, “The decision to flee came suddenly.”

I’m writing about departures because eventually I made my own departure. I almost wrote about some other departures: the going-away party of someone I wished I’d gotten to know better, other departures from other relationships, other going-away parties. They’re weird. But no. In almost every other situation, someone else was going away. This time, I fled. There was no planning. This was an ancient survival mechanism writ large upon society.

I’d fucked everything up. It seemed like I knew what I was doing, and I even told people there was a plan, but I was getting out of town as soon as possible. I sold everything I couldn’t take with me and found a plane ticket heading east, where there would be a house waiting for me. It was to be my sanctuary for the year. I’d hide there, lick my wounds, and gather myself up again. Until I found a story, in a new city, I could be mysterious. A lack of story could be my ‘thing.’ And I didn’t have to worry about any more departures happening. I’d left everything behind me.

Everything, that is, except for a tendency to make mistakes.

There are times when I wonder if I don’t sabotage myself just to make things interesting, just so I can watch the sparks. If I can be trusted with success. I think the first thing I did in the new city, before I’d even gone more than a mile from my house, except maybe to buy food, was start a fucked up relationship of the ‘random hooking up’ variety, except with all of those bizarre emotional strings attached that you tell yourself won’t matter this time around, because you talked about it, and you’re both cool with it. It was entirely disjointed, and only going downhill.

This isn’t to say that I’d ruined something beautiful. I only did that in the summer, which is a time when things languish and die, exhausted from the heat. But it was, above all else, avoidable. And it was, above all else, interesting. I had stories to tell, and who am I if not a storyteller? There was something to keep me interested and that is when I’m at my best.

Perhaps the worst part, the part that keeps me up at night, is it cost me nothing. It didn’t hurt, because I wasn’t there, not really. I was still thousands of miles away, sometimes in a dark room with writing on the walls, most of it in hands not mine, and sometimes in a house overlooking the freeway, in an emerald city that I could finally call home. Nothing could touch me here.