I remember the queen bed was stripped. Sad grey light came in through the two second-floor windows in my bedroom where the ceiling slanted down at an angle, matching the shape of the roof. My lime green IKEA desk with screw-in legs stood bare and garish — the desktop calendar that usually charted my schedule in a scribbled hand was gone. The dresser and closet were emptied of clothes, the walls vacated of retro superhero posters and a framed maxim I’d printed on US Letter: “Ramble not of your plans for the future; speak instead with your actions of the present.” A suitcase and duffel bag waited, stacked by the door. Since the duvet and sheets were already boxed-up, I likely spent those last two or three nights with just a sleeping bag on the mattress. This was how the room looked when I was preparing to leave my rental house in Guelph on the last day of my undergraduate degree, 2020. I’d packed early, as if to prove I was already gone.
On that day, there were also the added complications of COVID-19 — the campus closing, the sudden permission to go home, classes finishing online. But even amid the strangeness of it all, I remember noticing a familiar pattern: a quiet withdrawal I’m calling Departure Syndrome — emotional distance, impatience, location projection, and, of course, premature packing. It’s the anticipatory disconnection that sets in when you know you’re about to leave somewhere you’ve lived for a while — when you’re ready to go, and some part of you already has. Days before the actual departure, your attention shifts elsewhere; attachments dull; you’ve already begun to drift from people. I’m especially prone to it.
Departure Syndrome surfaced after nearly every transition of my undergraduate years — whether heading home for Christmas in December or leaving for the summer in April. It appeared at the University of Guelph, where I spent four years, and at SFU, where I did one. It returned in 2022, when I quit my job and left Vancouver to travel solo through Europe, and again four months later when it was time to return. It came with my move to the family cottage for a 100-day writing retreat in winter 2023, and lingered until I completed that self-imposed undertaking in the spring. It was there when I moved back to Vancouver two years ago, and now, as I contemplate a one-year teachers’ college program at the University of Auckland, I can feel it stirring once more — a restlessness returning even before a flight’s been booked.
I assume this is relatable behaviour — that I’m not the only one who grows weary of a place once they know they’re leaving. What is that, exactly? Perhaps it’s a kind of protection mechanism: a shield against grief, against a painful parting. Our brains start to dull the colours of the spaces we’ll soon abandon, making it easier to turn away. The neighbourhood once charming begins to feel cheap. The skyline becomes brutal. Garbage at the roadside draws attention. Even routine frustrations, like traffic or grocery prices, feel amplified. Maybe it’s simply proactivity — keeping busy, packing our belongings — or our emotions — to abate the nerves of relocation. But really, I think it’s this: we are incapable of inhabiting two places at once. When we know we’ll soon be elsewhere, it’s easiest to go there in our minds first.
For me, Departure Syndrome often took the form of a private rebellion. During my undergrad, I would daydream of leaving weeks before the semester ended. Much of that time was difficult — the promises of a magical university life had missed me; it felt like an obligation, not an adventure. I wanted to go home — to the friends who’d known me for a decade, to the town that had shaped me. Packing early, ensuring that the moment I finished my last exam I could load the car and drive off, was my way of rejecting the place altogether. I liked the callousness of a quick departure — as if leaving fast insulted the place I’d been, however petty that was. In a way, I was also renouncing the relationships, the people I’d tied to the location. If I was leaving, everything — and everyone — was staying behind. Those were my undergrad years.
I’m not as bitter now, but I still tend to pack early. I don’t know whether to call it commitment issues, permanence aversion, or something else entirely, but I carry a constant sense that things will change — that I’ll move on — I just don’t know when or why. Whenever someone asks if I see myself staying in Vancouver long-term, my answer is always a long-winded no. I explain that I’ve never been attached to a city. I’ve never had that “I love this neighbourhood” feeling. Maybe it’s time I learned to lower my guard. The distance I keep from place feels, at times, immature. A symptom of longing for a past I can’t return to. I’ve tried to internalize Thomas Wolfe’s “You can’t go home again,” but it’s never fully stuck. I am, undeniably, a nostalgia addict. Maybe not the worst I know, but one who returns to drink the sweet poison more often than he should. I should at least try to let myself fall in love with a place — and the people in it. I’m just scared doing so will mean abandoning the connections I’ve already built. I know that isn’t how it works, but the boy inside me still doesn’t understand.
If I go to Auckland in January, I want to arrive with an open mind, and a willingness to grow attached to the place and the people I meet there. I have to remind myself that won’t mean I’ll never see my family again, that I’ll never return to see my hometown’s eroding landmarks, or that I’ll be swapping my lifelong friends for a new set. Hell — even if I did, it would presumably be for something beautiful, something I haven’t felt in a long time: new love. If I do it right, maybe I’ll show no signs of Departure Syndrome at all, only the expected ache of leaving something you know you’ll miss. With that, then, my goal, a year or more from now, when I’ve finished the teaching diploma and it’s time to return to Canada, will be to be surprised by my departure. I should wake that morning having forgotten I even had a flight booked. Posters should be askew on my walls, laundry overflowing in the hamper, suitcases unfindable, a friend with a New Zealand accent at my door asking to go surfing. I should be half-thinking I might stay there forever — and for God’s sake, there should be sheets and blankets on the bed.
Trying to stay put,
B. F. Greeno, aka
recovering from more than one imagined malady
