The Weight of Leaving

I spent this morning packing the last of my books into cardboard boxes. It is strange how heavy paper becomes when you have to carry it from one life to the next. I found a dried flower tucked inside a journal from three years ago, and for a moment, I just sat on the floor, holding it. We spend so much of our time trying to hold onto places, to anchor ourselves to walls and windows, as if the space itself could keep us whole. But eventually, the boxes get taped shut and the keys go back on the counter. We leave behind the ghosts of who we were in those rooms, and we walk out into the dark, hoping that the next place will feel just as much like home. It is a quiet, hollow kind of ache, isn’t it? The realization that we are always just passing through, leaving pieces of our history behind in the shadows of places we can no longer stay.

Kazi Fazly Rabby has captured this feeling perfectly in his image titled Moonlight Sonata. It feels like a final, glowing goodbye to a place that once held everything. Does this image make you think of a place you’ve had to leave behind?