I choose Paris...

The end of August is coming soon. Tomorrow, school starts again in Bloomington. For everyone there, “next year” – meaning this 2007-2008 academic year – has already begun. This parallel life, this ghost life of mine, is continuing on without me. Because of this, my choice – although always heavily swaddled in abeyance and ambivalence (to go back for another year to teach in Paris, to not go back to Bloomington just quite yet) – has gained definitive weight. Now, I cannot go back to Bloomington – my teaching position has already been filled by someone else. That train has left the station. And I am not on it.

But when I am called upon to rationalize this decision, that definitive weight of my decision flounders into styrofoam. Why am I leaving again? And when that question is asked by someone for whom love is measured and manifested by presence – by my mother, whom I love in an overpowering way, who only wants me to stay – how do I verbalize to her this impulse to go, to keep going, to move beyond the known? How do I say that I want to hurl myself at different boundaries, to move past geography into something else – although that "else," I can hardly define?

It is in this darker, more desperate moment, when I am ready to convert any sign to symbol, that I read about the oak and hickory forests. These forests are slowly creeping northward over the east coast from their position 15,000 years ago after the last ice age. Granted, these forests are moving at glacial speed, which is really the only kind of speed I can understand. They move only a few inches per year over successive generations of trees. They are responding to climate change and water levels. But still, they are moving.

When I think of a sturdy, traveling oak tree – such a beautiful image allows me to imagine that distance is not betrayal, departure is not death, and even forests migrate.