The minutes preceding a departure have special vibrations. I usually find myself alert, but beset with a mix or anxiety, expectation, regret: a spiritual awareness of what is fleeting, tentative, tenuous. Moments when one looks down the glinting barrel of eternity --for the final personal act will be a going away. Departure: a threatening venture into the unknown, akin to birth, a passage from the familiar into the nebulous, from security into uncertainty, Gather yourself, ready the pieces, as time jostles, moments swirling into a vortex.

At last, the final glance around, the heavy emphasis of a closed door, engine bursting into life, brief breathless transition as conveyance creeps into motion --abruptly the crisis eases. For you have departed. Your aliveness, your presence in that place, becomes as remote, as fragile, as any remembered thing. Moving away you are in the grip of a strange unease, relief and resignation -- and where you were recedes into memory.
Chris put his comic aside, looking ahead through the windshield as we glided among leafless trees along the uncertain woods road.