I'm leaving in a couple of hours

[butnow]

I'm going to miss my endless piles of books, the scent of stage make-up and dust in the theatre, the little movie theatres where you can sit in the garden in the night and listen to trams go by as a boy falls for a girl who thinks she's a robot, the big bookstore where I once wrote a poem for an australian man who was travelling around the world with his wife, the tiny café next to my old school with mismatched cups and no menus, reading brilliant fanfiction on the metro on the way home, choking back tears and gasps, the costume storage room called 'Hell' at school, and the narrow spiral stairs that lead there, the way my philosophy teacher gets carried away, the books my creative writing teacher told me to read and her suffocating hugs, the trenches in the woods (but those I've missed ever since we stopped playing), the way you always feel lost when the night bus goes along the tiny, dark streets after midnight, this city I've called home for nineteen years.

but I'll exchange this for writingwritingwriting, for a room perhaps shared and perhaps not, for reinventing myself, for being on my own for the first time, for waking early and for being taught by writers, for having people who write&play instruments&draw&act&other such things all around me, for a small town with two churches and a library and a tiny swimming hall, for four kilometres' walk to the train station and the nearest city 24 minutes away, for getting lost&maybe found.

(and I'll come back for fiction, before this strange year has passed.)