Fare you well my honey / Fare you well my only true one / All the birds that were singing have flown except you alone.

Goodbye was never supposed to be difficult.
Bags were packed, bed made. Summer slipped away and final embraces lingered, clinging for a few extra seconds.
For years, I had thought of nothing else—I survived on nothing else—but my final descent down the chipped concrete porch steps. The present was misery, so the future became an obsession.
Hell, I’d been saying goodbye my whole life.

A lump rested firmly between my swollen tonsils that morning.
I suppressed a gag, the tennis ball-sized mass pressing itself further into the depths of my esophagus. 5 years or so ago: that was the last time I’d cried.
Pulling out of the loose gravel driveway, past the bush I’d hit a few dozen times, a tear slowly crept down my chubby right cheek.
I searched for a grounding force in my mother’s eyes.
She’d always been stubbornly strong—something I found equally frustrating and revering.
I waited for her to say everything would be alright; I waited for her to encourage me to leave. I’ve seen her weak, but not like this: her eyes lightly glazed, her bottom lip clenched below her upper teeth.
She knew I hated seeing her cry, so she turned her head toward the driver’s side window.
Silence.

Going to leave this broke-down palace / On my hands and my knees I will roll, roll, roll.

I like to think I didn’t have a choice in the matter, but maybe that’s just because it’s less painful than accepting all that I left behind.
Fare you well, childhood longings, too fragile to carry.
Fare you well, mother, who taught me love and codependency in equal measure.
Fare you well, chaos, the only home I ever knew.
Perhaps I’m wildly conceited, but my palace broke down more every day. I can’t be in the business of fixing it anymore.
Yet, the familiar lump in my throat swells as the library murmurs fade into the hushed stillness of the early morning.
A memory strikes like a match—quick, searing.
The fist-shaped hole, hidden behind the festival poster in the entryway.
The post in the basement, etched with my height, but never my worth.
The duffle bag propped against my bedroom door all those summers ago, ready to leave it all behind, alone.
“She’s still there,” I tell myself.
Was I the anchor keeping my mother from drifting back?
I pray she is strong enough to resist the pull of the life we left behind—or at least stubborn enough.
Tears don’t fall anymore, but the guilt remains unchanged.
I’m needed; I’m sorry.

In a bed / In a bed / By the waterside I will lay my head / Listen to the river sing sweet songs and rock my soul.

I wish for the day I lay my head in peace—
untethered from those I can’t save anymore and the pieces of myself I left behind.
Maybe I was never the anchor. Maybe the palace was.
I didn’t say goodbye then—when I walked down the front porch steps for the final time—but I’m saying it now.

Things are better here, unbroken, but my child self still follows me—obsesses over me.
I’d like to say I’ve been reinvented, but I’m the same.
I’ve cut my bangs again, as I do every spring and I still listen to the same sad songs.
But I don’t fear what’s behind my door anymore; I don’t recognize the footsteps walking past it. The sound of my palace crumbling was once deafening; now it lingers quietly in the background. I look forward to silence, for once.

Mama, mama, many worlds I’ve come, since I first left home.