The retun of leaving

Those who imagine life to be a piling up of events won’t get more from their closeness to an ending than the knowledge that yet another thing has come to pass. But those who picture life to be a circle can at such instance look forward to the return of what has been. Since instead of further away from it than ever, you'll get closer to the beginning than you’ve been for a long time.

Within less than a month my return to the continent will be a fact. The electronic payment functioned as a signature, underwriting a contract with myself. From that moment on, the city didn’t feel as before. Did anything change around me? I can’t seem to blame my surroundings: it is my perception of them that has suddenly turned around.

One of my theories explaining this is that reality will be adapted to our wish to be consistent in what we say. Since I know that I will depart, I can no longer position the place I’m leaving above my destination. That would render my behaviour a-logical: “although I want to be in Cape Town, I decide to leave it”. With Amsterdam regarded as a better location, my decision is suddenly sound. That in this case I allow myself to pervert honesty for logic is astonishing.
Or was this thinking as wishful as I thought it was? It rather seems that the honesty considered to have been given up upon booking my flight back, had become the victim of my wanderlust a long time before: right when I booked my flight to come here.

As usual, the truth is located somewhere in the middle. The feelings built around my leaving posses an enormous ambiguity, and are located deeper than the expected circumstances than weather patterns, friends and family, natural beauty or security. It’s the smaller things that are hard to be put into words that have taken over my thoughts and fight for right of way, vulnerable as they are for the ‘test of time’ and ‘out of sight, out of mind’.

And the circle nears completion. The same sense of immediacy brought about by the first months of my stay has returned and urges me through surroundings that scream their particularities at me with renewed vigour. This time not because they want to be learned, but this time not to be forgotten.