Leaving

The sound of a tattered canvas duffle bag hitting the rust-covered truck bed echoed far past the backyard planted pines and into the fields surrounding the neighborhood lake - a pond, really, dug from the exhausted soil of a former cotton field turned suburban neighborhood - and returned, diminished now but still familiar. It was a sound he'd heard many times before. He'd thrown his bag into the back of truck a couple of times a day for several years. Still, the finality of the moment, realizing that this would be the last time he stood in this spot of the driveway - his spot - hit him.

This was it. He was leaving. No more mornings smelling the blooming purple and pearl azaleas and dogwoods of a south Georgia spring, flowers that symbolized all he would miss of his home.

He was leaving his family. His dad, strong and vulnerable all in one moment, had asked him again the night before not to go, not to abandon all that hed known. His mother, a stalwart of emotional security, hadn't cried, but had looked at him with such helplessness that he knew her heart was breaking. She would survive. She'd always survived before, through her sons tumultuous teenage years when he'd been more instrument of torture than loving progeny, through the death of her father, the family patriarch, from an illness that drained not only his own life away but stole life force from an entire family leaving the a hollow shell of extended familiar ties in its wake. His sister, petite and as emotionally vulnerable, had cried on his shoulder before sliding down the hallway wall to her bedroom for the sleep that takes all problems.

Of course, he'd miss them terribly.

But he'd decided - no, committed - to leave, and he wasn't turning back now. He took a moment to look around one last time, to gather together the courage it would take to walk out of one life and into a new one, an unknown one, before flopping down into the driver's seat.

The engine hesitated before roaring to life, and he backed the heavy frame of the truck down the winding driveway to the only road he'd ever lived on. He breathed heavily and wiped a tear from his cheek before adjusting the rearview mirror to garner one last glance at his home. He jammed the stick shift down into second and faced the open road, somehow new to him even after all of these years, and turned the steering wheel south, guiding the truck to new destinations, new adventures, and the life he dreamed he would one day come to see.