The Travelling Flame

You arrive, and the temperature of the room changes. Then you go. You have lit things in people that are still burning in cities you no longer live in — a career someone changed after one conversation with you, a marriage someone left, a book someone finally wrote. You do not stay to see it, and you rarely know it happened.

What is natural to you is the leap. New language, new city, new field, new idea — you learn fast because you are not protecting a position. People love you for the size of the world you carry into a room. Being near you makes their own life feel less fixed.

The price is that you have made a philosophy out of an escape route. Some of your departures were freedom. Some of them happened at precisely the moment things became real enough to require you, and you left before anyone could ask you to stay, and you called that being unbound. You have a horizon and very little ground. The tiredness you feel is not from the travelling. It is from never having been held anywhere long enough to rest.