This Is How You Leave Home

By Mayda Alexandra del Valle
I want to ask you if you ever wanted to leave.
If you can see yourself living somewhere other than here:
this city that put the wind in your lungs,
the ice in your stare.
 
It's not that I hated home—
it's just that my sense of destiny made me look
beyond the invisible border.
 
The night before I left for college,
my cousin Edgar married his high school sweetheart Rocio.
The coral dresses my sister and I wore were just like
the ones we wore a week earlier for her best friend Delilah's wedding.
My mother wished we just recycled those damn dresses—
no one would have known the difference.
 
Rocio's youngest brother looked at me all night
like he wished we'd met sooner
and when I saw him a year later on a trip home
when my sister was dating his older brother
his gaze slipped up and down the extra freshman fifteen
that had settled in places that bordered on adolescent
the last time he saw me.
 
Anyway—
 
we left the reception early, came back to the house to finish packing.
Already in the back seat were the green Samsonite
suitcases we used for that trip to Puerto Rico when I was five,
boxes with my twin-sized bedding, my favorite stuffed animal
jammed up next to the dorm-room-sized fridge and small TV
with built-in VCR that they got me from Service Merchandise.
 
I took off the coral taffeta, looked around the wreck of my room:
the white canopy frame that I'd slept under since I was three,
taken apart and put downstairs, so I could leave the mattress
on the floor, attempt to have a grown-looking room.
 
That was the last summer, the last time I ran up to the sweltering cathedral
cavern of our attic, swung out the windows so I could stick my head out,
just to catch a glimpse of downtown, far out in the distance.
I could see the sparkling outline of the Sears Tower and the John Hancock.
 
When we got on the I-90 heading east to Indiana I looked back
to see the point of the Sears Tower blink in the distance.
Repeating my mother's exodus from her island birthplace
to escape from her mother. I inherit this tendency to run.
On the radio: This is how we chill from '93 till.

Copyright Credit: Mayda del Valle, "This is How You Leave Home" from The University of Hip Hop. Copyright © 2017 by Mayda del Valle. Reprinted by permission of Northwestern University.
Source: The University of Hip Hop (Northwestern University Press, 2017)