Leaving: Part Six - Love Letter to a Ghost Town

Dearest Wilmywood:
I fought you for so many years, unable to see the ways that you were slowly, inextricably becoming a part of me. Your landscape was my landscape - your streets mapped out in my brain, your buildings in my mind's eye, your river and ocean made my boundaries. I know your steepled skyline, your cobbled streets, your ancient trees and your columned houses. And while I was fighting to let go, I found so much to hold on to that now you haunt me.

And flashing over the bridge, I saw the familiar riverfront and I met my ghosts. There was the ghost of my life past, an eerie shadow of all that belonged to me that no longer does. An apartment I no longer have a key for in a house that still seems like mine. And the office that I sat in has two desks and someone who started the day after I left. Three have joined the company and another is leaving, such that in just a few months time, the cracks have shifted and filled and the place that I was is gone.

On your streets, I saw strangers and tourists and realized that I am a stranger to you now. This is the ghost of my present life, a subtle shift in things that reminds me that change has come. New buildings, construction along familiar streets, a sudden moment driving when I couldn't remember where to go. I've left and you've gone on. You're a different city, and I am a different person, and we simply can't be what we once were.

All of this made all too real by a phone call on the way to see you in which I accepted a new start. And here we meet the ghost of my future life, the hollow-eyed face of the unknown. Even as I was there with you, I was thinking about it - this life in another place that I'm headed towards. This ghost is the most frightening, for it tells me that, to go with it, I must let go of more of what I'm holding.

And, Wilmywood, I must tell you, I don't want to let go. I want to hold on to you and Grace Street and the river and the places that I know. I want to make friends with the ghost of the past, change the ghost of the present and turn my back on the ghost of the future. But we both know I can't do that. We both know it was time for me to go.

But it doesn't mean that I don't miss you. That I don't know now that I loved you. That I didn't cry when I drove away from you, on the street I know so well, past the buildings that marked my existence. And even as I leave, it's all printed in my mind. I'm going now, taking hold of that future, but we'll always have what we shared. And, if we're honest, I think we both know, you'll still be a part of me.

Love,
Ashley