On Leaving Places You Never Owned

Every city I've lived in has a version of me that stayed. I think about them sometimes, those ghosts of almost — the self who took the other job, signed the longer lease, said yes when I said no. They are living parallel lives in apartments I no longer remember the layout of, in neighborhoods I could not find my way back to without a map.

I have never owned property. This is partly financial and partly, I think, temperamental. There is something in me that resists the idea of a place being mine — as if ownership would make leaving harder, or make staying feel like surrender. I am aware this is a kind of privilege, the luxury of treating impermanence as a philosophy rather than a condition.

But I have loved places I did not own. I have loved them the way you love things you know you will lose — with a particular intensity, a heightened attention. The coffee shop on the corner of a street I no longer live on. The park where I used to read on Sunday mornings. The view from a window I looked out of for two years and then never saw again.

There is a grief specific to leaving places. It is different from the grief of losing people, though it rhymes with it. When a person dies, the world loses them. When you leave a place, you lose the world — or a version of it, the version that existed in relation to you, the version that knew your routines and your shortcuts and the particular angle at which you liked to sit.

I have been thinking about what it means to belong somewhere you do not own. The answer I keep arriving at is: attention. You belong to a place by paying attention to it. By learning its moods and its light and its particular smell in different seasons. By knowing which streets flood when it rains and which café has the best window seat and where the herons go in winter.

The places I have loved most are the places I paid the most attention to. And the attention was possible, I think, because I knew I would leave. Impermanence sharpens the eye. When you know you are passing through, you look.

The version of me that stayed in every city is still there, looking. I hope he is paying attention. I hope he knows what he has.