I left town this week. Not for a change of scenery — because a fever was setting in and I could feel it taking hold, and my doctor kept insisting the disturbance was already under way. So I packed the car and left, over your protests, because I remembered something a wise friend once said when he got sick in a foreign country: the illness wasn't in his body, it was in the place. I told you the same thing before I left, even though you weren't fully convinced.
You worry about my health more than I worry about it myself, and somewhere along the way your worry became mine too. That's not weakness — I used to think caring that much about staying alive for someone else's sake was a kind of softness I'd outgrow. I don't think that anymore. A person who won't fight to stay a little longer for the people who love them isn't brave, they're just self-indulgent in a different direction. Loving someone means occasionally choosing to stay, even when leaving would be easier.
And it worked — the air changed, the food changed, and within days I felt myself again. But here's the part I actually want to tell you: the place didn't heal me. I did, by finally getting some distance from the noise. Because there's an old story about a man who complained that travel hadn't helped him at all, and the reply was: of course it didn't — you brought yourself along.
If you want to escape your troubles, you don't need a different city. You need a different person to be.
That's the whole problem with running, isn't it. Wherever you go, you're still the one deciding that your neighbor's promotion diminishes you, that losing someone proves the universe is cruel, that safety itself is something to be nervous about. None of that is fixed by a plane ticket. You can circle the globe and still be exactly as afraid as when you left, because fear doesn't live in zip codes. It lives in you, and it packs its bags right alongside yours.
What you're running from is not outside you. It's the passenger.
So here's what I'd actually ask of you, if I could ask just one thing: stop hunting for new coordinates and start paying attention to who you're keeping company with — including yourself. If you spend your days around people who are anxious, grasping, cruel in small ways, you will absorb it without noticing, the way you'd absorb a draft in a cold room. Surround yourself instead with people who've actually faced hard things without flinching — not for the inspiration, but because proximity changes you whether you're paying attention or not.
I think of the ones who never bent, no matter what came at them — not because nothing touched them, but because they'd already decided what they were willing to lose. That's not a fixed personality trait, by the way. It's a decision, made early and repeated daily.
You can do more than you think. The difficulty isn't in the task — it's in the hesitation before it.
Home, and steadier than I left —