Why Do I Leave You?

I love you, the little me.
The curious one sifting through pages of books, stringing words together into fascinating sentences, weaving your own little magic and putting your vision onto paper. Binding tiny notebooks with thread and turning them into storybooks.

You were always an enigma, a light wrapped in a small package, moving through the day fascinated by the vast universe. By towering walls covered in books and concepts. There was always so much to learn, so much to read, so much to absorb. And then to pour it all back out again in a vocabulary only you understood, in a joy only you could truly feel, though others could sense it too.

You were marvelous.
And yet you were little, ever existing in the background of my present life, my ever-present past.

I still look up to you as if you guide me.

But I do not understand why I always leave you.

Why do I leave you?

It is a question the older version of me, armed with wisdom, words, and so-called experience, still cannot answer. I see the light. I see the vision. Yet somehow I always abandon you and wander back into dark alleys, through dim tunnels swollen with grief and stagnation growing like weeds.

I talk to ghosts there.
I run from alley cats.
I avoid the rats and the sewers and lose my way again in my own drunkenness.

And then the hangover fades.

And I come running back to you.

I hold you close and promise I will never leave again. Like an untrustworthy parent, I cling to you, drawn once more toward your vibrant light. I believe you again. We walk together through gardens and jungles, stringing words into worlds.

And yet I still leave.

I keep leaving, and I keep returning.

I do not know why.

Sometimes I wonder when the chase and return will finally end, when we will stop abandoning each other and simply live together peacefully, forever.