On Staying

I have written before about leaving. This is about the other thing — the harder thing, maybe.

Staying is underrated. We have a literature of departure, of the open road, of the self reinvented in a new place. We do not have much of a literature of the person who stays, who chooses the same street and the same view and the same set of relationships, year after year, and finds in that continuity something that the leaver never finds.

I am not, by nature, a stayer. I have moved too many times to count, and each move has felt, at the time, like a kind of freedom. But I have watched people who stay, and I have come to think that staying requires a different kind of courage than leaving does.

Leaving is a decision you make once. Staying is a decision you make every day.

The person who stays in a place watches it change around them. They see the coffee shop close and the new building go up and the neighborhood shift in ways that are sometimes good and sometimes not. They accumulate a history with a place that the leaver never accumulates. They become, in some sense, part of the place — and the place becomes part of them.

There is a woman in the town where I grew up who has lived in the same house for sixty years. She knows every family on her street, knows their histories and their children and their losses. She is a kind of living archive. When she is gone, a great deal of knowledge will go with her — not the kind of knowledge that gets written down, but the kind that lives in a person who was present.

I think about her when I think about staying. I think about what it means to be present somewhere long enough to become part of its memory.

I am still learning how to stay. I am not sure I will ever be good at it. But I am trying to understand what it offers — what the stayer knows that the leaver does not.

I think it has something to do with depth. With the difference between knowing a place and knowing a place well. With the particular intimacy that only time can create.