There is a specific week — usually about eleven months before you actually leave — when the city stops meeting your eye. It is nothing dramatic. The bookshop clerk on your corner starts being just polite instead of familiar. The waiter at the wine bar you go to on Wednesdays gives you a table, not your table. The bus route you learned at twenty-three has been slightly rerouted, and you learn about it only when you miss the stop. You are not being pushed out. You are being politely un-included.
You will spend the next eleven months, if you are like most of the women I have watched leave a place, either arguing with this feeling or dressing it up as something else — I need to buy a coat, I need a better therapist, I should join a gym in Kentish Town, I should re-download the app. All of these are useful interventions. None of them is the intervention.
The bag on the shelf.
A friend, moving from Chicago to Berlin at thirty-one, taught me the small-bag test, which she in turn had learned from her aunt. The test is this: take the smallest travel bag you own — a shoulder duffel, an overnight tote, something that will pass as hand luggage on any airline — and, over a single Saturday afternoon, fill it with what you would take if you were leaving tomorrow and could not come back for six weeks. Not the winter coat. Not the books. Not the framed photographs. Just: what fits in the bag.
If you can fill the bag, you already know. You have known for some time, and the last eleven months were the polite version of the knowing. If you cannot fill the bag — if you get to the third sweater and realise you don't know which of them you like without the mirror in your current bedroom — the city has not finished with you. It is still a real address.
When to leave.
There is a bad version of leaving that is really running away — out of a lease you cannot afford, out of a relationship that has embarrassed you, out of a job that you have been surviving for six months. That kind of leaving is not the subject of this dispatch. That kind of leaving is a decision to be made in your own bed on a Sunday morning, ideally after breakfast, and it usually solves fewer problems than you hope. Take it seriously, but don't tell yourself it is a chapter change; it is a first aid measure.
The kind of leaving that this dispatch is about is quieter and usually more difficult. You are not unhappy. You are, if anything, quietly capable in the current place. The rent is fine. The friendships are intact. It is Wednesday in October and you are watching the light change over the same street you have watched it change over for six years, and you are, without announcing it to yourself, already gone. The signs, in order:
- You catch yourself planning "one last summer" — twice.
- You are giving your out-of-town friends slightly outdated tips about your own city.
- You have started, in conversations, to say "when I was here" — in the past tense. In this city. While standing in it.
- You are ready to redecorate the flat. You have been ready for eight months. You have bought nothing.
A city does not owe you a farewell. Almost nobody's does. The polite un-inclusion is how a city says you have graduated.
How to leave.
Give it a date. This is the single biggest thing you can do. A dateless departure is a lifestyle; a date is a decision. The date can be soft — "the second half of February" is enough — but it must exist in your calendar in ink. Everything else falls out of the date. The lease. The conversation with your parents. The rethinking of the furniture. The two dinners you owe people. Without the date, the leaving is theoretical. With the date, it starts organising your Wednesdays for you.
Do not sell anything for four weeks. This is a rule my mother gave me and it has, in every subsequent move, been correct. For the first four weeks after the date is set, do not sell, donate, or throw away a single object. You are not yet the version of yourself who lives in the next place. You do not know what she needs. In week five, when the shape of the next apartment is starting to form in your mind, you can begin. You will get rid of the right things. The four weeks are protecting you from getting rid of the wrong ones.
Tell three people. Not the group chat. Not the mailing list. Not the update-notice on Instagram. Three specific people, in person, over drinks or a walk, in that order. It will do a strange thing to your voice the first time you say the sentence out loud, and you want to be surrounded by faces you love the first time it happens. After the third telling, it will begin to sound true. This is the point.
What to pack in the small bag.
The last question, and in many ways the most interesting. Not because the packing itself matters much — you can and will replace nearly anything you don't take — but because the list, when you write it out, is the closest thing you will get to a portrait of the woman about to leave.
Mine, for a move from London to Lisbon three summers ago, was six things. A brown wool coat. One black dress. Trainers I could walk twenty kilometres in. The notebook — not the good one, the working one. A copy of a novel I had read four times and would read a fifth. A leather pouch with three photographs, my grandmother's earrings, and a set of house keys I had already returned to the landlord and could no longer open anything with.
That was the woman. Everything else that came out of that flat — the shelves of books, the wine glasses from Portobello, the bicycle, the two other coats, the plant a boyfriend had bought me in the second year — was furniture for who I had been, not who I was about to be. It went, over the four weeks after the small bag was packed, in the order I could bear to lose it. The bicycle went last. It always does.
The city, incidentally, remembered me kindly. I have been back six times. It is not my city anymore. It never asked me to stay. That was the honest thing about it. It let me leave the way it had let me arrive: quietly, on a Tuesday, with a bag on my shoulder that was smaller than the one I had feared I would need.