contradiction, 2

a friend said she moved
across the country
with only two suitcases
sold everything she owned
just left a box of documents
back at her father’s home

i speak reverently of the
process of purging,
of making due with less,
and yet i have a car
filled with books which have
gone unread for years,
a guitar i haven’t touched in months,
boxes full of scraps of paper
that only seem to matter when i
consider throwing them away

that sentiment is
important, though.

all those bits and pieces
are what have made up my life,
reminders of where i’ve come from,
where i’ve tried to go, where
i return to again and again

i just don’t know what to let go

the harder i think about it
the less all of these things mean
the less i can accept the way
things are, the way i’m going

i want to walk away
from the boxes
from the city
from this computer screen
from my phone

the things are easy
to think of leaving
if i think of them
as just things,
if i set aside
that all of them
connect me to what
i cannot consider leaving:
all the human beings
who matter to me

when i remember that
then the leaving
is far from easy.

yet there must
be some way
to make some change

i’ve done so many
of the small ones
already

there’s are only
big ones left to make

like maybe
figuring out how,
as i journey along
this road,
to join with other people,
and to take some with me.