Instructions for Leaving Before You Arrive

First, lose the key.

Not the silver one from the kitchen drawer—

the smaller key, the one you haven’t been given yet,

the one that opens Apartment 4B

where, in two winters,

you will stand barefoot at 2:17 a.m.

watching snow bury the city

while someone you love

pretends not to cry behind the bathroom door.

You should leave before that happens.

Actually, no.

Stay long enough to memorize

the crack in the ceiling above the bed,

because years earlier—

when you are still twelve,

still hiding under your grandmother’s table

during thunderstorms—

that same crack will appear in a dream

and you will think it means death.

It doesn’t.

The death comes later.

Or earlier.

A man in a grocery store drops a jar of peaches.

Glass explodes across white tiles.

A child laughs.

Someone screams in another aisle.

You won’t understand until August

that this was the exact moment

your marriage began ending.

Cause and effect are overrated.

For example:

You will apologize to your brother

three days after his funeral.

He will forgive you

sixteen years before the argument.

That’s how love works sometimes—

moving backward to repair damage

before it fully exists.

In the beginning

there is the ocean.

No, that’s wrong.

In the beginning

there is a hospital corridor

smelling of bleach and old coffee,

where your mother sits turning a paper cup

between nervous fingers.

You are not born yet

but already she looks tired.

Much later

you will inherit that exhaustion

like eye color.

At seven years old

you bury a dead bird in the backyard

inside a shoebox covered with stars.

At forty

you realize this was practice.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the middle,

the city floods.

Fish swim through underground tunnels.

Traffic lights blink uselessly beneath green water.

A pianist on the fifth floor

keeps playing Mozart

while people carry televisions upstairs

like sacred objects.

You are there briefly.

Or maybe you only saw photographs afterward.

Memory edits aggressively.

There is also the woman on the train.

The woman with yellow gloves

who says,

“Don’t miss your stop,”

without looking up from her newspaper.

You laugh because you think

she means the station.

Ten years later

you understand.

By then

the dog is already gone,

the apartment emptied,

the ocean climbing higher each season.

By then

your father has become younger in memory

than you are in real life.

That part unsettles you most.

One evening in October

you sit beside a lake

watching leaves rot beautifully in the water.

Across from you,

a little boy throws stones at the surface

trying to break the reflection of the moon.

You want to tell him

that some things cannot be shattered.

But you know better.

You have seen entire futures collapse

because of one unopened letter,

one delayed train,

one sentence spoken too softly.

You have also seen impossible things survive.

A cracked teacup.

A war-torn church.

A woman learning to laugh again

while unpacking boxes in a city

she swore she would never return to.

And finally—

though nothing is truly final—

there comes the morning

when you wake before dawn

certain you have forgotten something important.

You search pockets, drawers, old notebooks.

Nothing.

Then the sun rises

through curtains you do not recognize,

and suddenly you remember:

the missing key,

the flooded city,

the peaches breaking open on white tiles,

the dream before the ceiling cracked,

the apology spoken after the grave.

None of it was out of order.

You were simply living

several lives at once.