July 3, 1980

Yes, I leave this city behind, my home, Columbus. Might I be at least a notable exception? Do those who have known me plead with me to stay? Will they remember me? No, I don't think so. My image will fade, a flicker of light, a guttering candle flame along a farmer's track in a cornfield on a glum, lonely, bright summer day whose anomalous brightness a vole shuns, for what is a votive candle set up to time to a vole in the middle of nowhere? -- Perhaps, as a signpost to the transitoriness of time? With a click of their camera aperture eyelids I departed. But then, if and when I return -- Will it be a return to that same image each of them held at the instant of their respective batting eyelids at my departure? No, it will be a lost cause, an anachronism. (And this is a lost cause with you, dear reader, an issueless expatiation.) I will be like a letter disposed of in the dead letter office of their collective memory, or more instantly, like a contrarian Kodak snapshot, fade into a white emulsion in their retinas, my respective images at each of my departures from them sucked in by the gyring cones and jousting rods of their retinas, not even the impression of a meme left behind in memory's cloaca, not even a cipher left of me.

Even my natal home in Columbus at 3474 Milton Ave. is razed, my parents' home in Mudsock, an empty crossroads, an iota of black ink on a Rand-McNally map of Ohio. And what of my friendships? –abandoned weigh stations along a highway. But, the past must not be latched onto, dwelled on. The man I met who couldn't remember his girlfriend of six years ago... Mon Dieu, six years ago? Depuis quand? Time encroaches on me and I wish it were Friday.