“To Me at Two”
by Evelyn Villanueva
Instructions for Leaving Home
Do not tie your shoes until the sun has burned the horizon and the desert has whispered your name through stones that will forget it before night, do not expect the road to remember you or the wind to carry your weight beyond the corners where light hesitates like an unanswered question.
Take only what you can carry in your hands, but know that memory will follow in your pockets and refuse to be folded, refuse to be left behind, and the echo of your steps will measure everything you have not yet learned.
Sing softly to the shadows that trail your every step, the song is yours though it belongs to no one, do not stop when the horizon breaks into shards of sky, for it is never wide enough to hold the shape of you, and the doors you pass will always close a moment too soon.
Do not ask where the borders begin or end, the walls are closer than you imagine, walk them until your feet know the rhythm of repetition, leave footprints that vanish before the night closes, and understand that all roads eventually curve back to dust.
Do not trust the eyes in the window, they do not blink for you, do not linger in the house with empty doors, it is a map you will redraw and erase a hundred times without ever learning the pattern, and each corridor will feel both familiar and unknowable.
Do not pretend you can hold the past in one hand while carrying the present in the other, do not try to step outside yourself, the cycle is a river, you will enter it at twelve and find it waiting at twenty-seven, and again, again, and again, until motion itself becomes your only measure.
Do not speak to the boy who believed in light, he will not understand the echo of your steps or the smoke and shifting sand beneath your palms, he will not recognize the charm pressed tight to your skin, and do not offer him instructions he cannot follow.
Let the songs be half-heard and half-remembered, let the roads curve back on themselves, let the walls breathe and the shadows count your name, let the desert fold you inward and the horizon bend like ribs over your back, this is the shape of leaving, this is the shape of staying.
Do not call it remorse, do not call it regret, do not call it freedom, it is a cycle you will know before the sun rises and after it falls, it is a wheel without center, it is your own face fading and returning without permission and without end, and yet, you must step forward anyway into the wind that cannot be tamed, into the steps that have always been your own, because the journey has no choice but to continue.
Forever observing,
You
