The boxes are packed and the lease is signed in ink,
the old address already starting to unhinge
from the tongue like a word you said so long
it lost its meaning — standing at the edge
of everything familiar, right and wrong
swapped places on the shelf, and the dread
and the wanting are the same sensation now,
the gut can’t sort the terror from the vow.
The man in the mirror looks like someone new,
or someone old enough to try again,
the city behind him and the road cuts through
to something he can’t name but feels like when
you’re seventeen and stupid and the summer
stretches out ahead without a ceiling —
except you’re not seventeen and the number
on the lease reminds you what you’re feeling
costs more than it did then, lands different,
stakes embedded in the hope like splinters.
New beginning nerves, half-sick with the size of it,
the old life folded up and nothing yet to sit
inside the empty rooms that echo back your name —
the fear and the desire feel exactly the same,
new beginning nerves, the shaking honest hand,
the man who burned his map and has to learn the land,
it’s scary in the way that only open doors can be,
new beginning nerves — and I am finally free.
The guys at the old job took him out on Friday,
said the things men say when someone leaves the frame —
good luck, keep in touch, the standard guideway
of departures, the ceremonial claim
of bonds that distance tests and mostly breaks,
and he smiled through it knowing what he knows,
that the life he’s leaving shed him like a snake
sheds what it grew in, and the new one grows
in the discomfort of the in-between,
in the specific vertigo of the unmade,
in the white walls of a flat that hasn’t seen
his pictures yet or learned the way he’s stayed
by staying — and the empty room is terrifying
and the empty room is every possibility,
and both are true at once and both are vying
for the same square footage in his chest, you see.
Nobody tells you that the freedom feels like falling
for the first few weeks, that the absence of the weight
you carried is itself a kind of appalling
lightness, that the body doesn’t calibrate
correctly to the open, having been so long
compressed by the familiar and its cost —
the freedom lands as wrongness before long
it lands as what it is, before the lost
becomes the found, before the empty flat
acquires the density of a life resumed,
before the mirror shows a man who’s sat
inside his own life willingly, not entombed
in the one that fit by habit rather than by choice,
the one he wore past the point it fit,
the one he shed to find his actual voice —
that takes the weeks it takes, he’ll manage it.
He puts the first picture on the first nail,
stands back, adjusts the angle, looks around
the room that’s starting, slowly, without fail,
to hold him — and the vertigo has found
its floor, and the floor is his, and the wall
is his, and the picture is the first small claim
of a life assembling itself
around a man who chose it, finally chose it,
who stood at the edge and stepped, and felt the shelf
of solid ground beneath, and didn’t lose it.