"There are strange moments where the present already belongs to your past - your last days at work, for instance, when problems and politics there became a tale told in the third person. Koch looked around his office as if it already belonged to someone else." ~ Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall (London: Granta Books, 2003), 177.
I have left so many places to know this to be true. Plans made in front of you that you are not, cannot be, included in, despite having been an integral part of them in the past. And you cannot even be offended at not being part of it all since you're leaving. Then things continue without you. They take on a shape that is familiar but has gone beyond the familiar. It is no longer your world.
Here is another quote, that I have carried with me since my first heartbreak, that of leaving Australia. Maybe my heart was broken because it was the one time I was in complete love with myself?
"You get a strange feeling when you are about to leave a place... like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again." ~ Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (New York: Random House, 2004).
Funny how both these quotes come from people writing about totalitarian regimes...
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