A Rovin', A Rovin', A Rovin', I'll go

If you move to the antipodes, you will leave many things behind. Some of those things will be problems. If you're lucky, as I am, you will leave problems, regrets, anxieties, misery, hopelessness, traffic, high prices, embrassament, humiliation, hatred, and love. Some of those things will inevitably be people as well. Many of those people, about you once felt hatred or fear or jealousy or envy or anger or disappointment  or frustration, will fade from your daily concienseness, like the contrail of the airplane you came on. Love doesn't fade. You will find it relatively easy to keep in touch with your closest loved ones. In the modern age, we just live in a mirror reflection of day/night time zones. Things are really no different than if you lived just out of convenient driving range. You might even see each other once or twice a year. Many, many people will be replaced by their equivalents in your new home. You may login to social media a few times year after having beers on the rooftop to find out what's happened in their lives, and get a sort of pleasure from the experience, but you aren't a child, so you don't participate in much social media and you're aware that you and those people have been slowly growing apart anyway, like leave son the same tree. After a half decade or so, you'll find you've held onto the ones you love, and mostly let go of the bad stuff. Running away mostly works. Maybe when you go back for a visit, there are some beerful tears and apologies and vows to stay closer, but they come to naught. Inevitably, there are a couple of people who defy the easy categories. Maybe a friend who fucked you out some money, but you can spend a weekend at the beach with ignoring the fact. Maybe a family member from whom you've grown apart, but still manage to make it work for the short times you're in the same room. Maybe it's someone you never skated with because you both thought you had grown out of it, but who stuck a tack through his cheek the first night you met him because "any man can do whatever the fuck he wants." In my case, you don't talk for years, because the shame of failure taints the escape from your homeland, and that is the only person who you think knows the whole story and about whose opinion of yourself you give two flying fucks. So you just avoid it. You don't call or write or talk or send a line message. You always knew no one was going to live to the end of time. When your first friend died, your dad had said, "from now on, it's either you or them." Then you get some bad news, and give the man a call. From the rooftop in the middle of the night, the signal is bad. You get some words in, but nothing consequential. At least you heard his voice.