The Transient Manifesto
by robert rae

Dear all you who share my existence,

My apologies for being so impersonal, but since I'm cutting loose and running with nary a warning, I didn't want it to seem as if I cared too much; of course, I do, but you're not to see that - what tearing out of guts I do will be done alone and unseen, as such things were meant to be.

Friends, relatives, aquaintances: there are so many of you that I hardly know where to start. Classmates, enemies, teammates, teachers, colleagues: all you who I nod at in the street or chat with in the hallways, read books with or run laps, prop up on late-night bus trips, lean upon on the six a.m. train. Lovers. This letter goes to all of you (or perhaps will go, or maybe even never will at all) because you have the misfortune to brush past my life on the way through your own; you have drawn the unlucky card that leads you to watch the sun go down with me or wake up with my head next to yours - sometimes even both. You are, for the most part, my life: buildings, days, events, they come and go, but you are everything that makes up me; everything that holds together the patchwork quilt that is the life of Robert Rae, such as it is. You poor people.

This letter is to let you know that actually, it has never existed. At college, at church, at home, at work, you have stitched me together from what scraps of normality you can find lying around, a Frankenstein's monster of selective blindness and wishful thinking. Every one of you thinks you see me: maybe you don't all pretend to understand, but you at least trust your senses; you shouldn't. After all, what would you find if you got together? If you compared notes? Probably that you all overlap at the edges, at the places where you've sewed my life shut, but do you recognize the pattern? Do you realise you're looking at the same life? Of course not. When you have a hundred weavers trying to work with the same ball of string, do you really expect to get something sane? Well, congratulations; I have unraveled my clothes and walked off naked into the rain.

It was about time.

One of these days, I will be gone. I sounds like something crazy, and it really is: after all, I have a life many people would die for, a good home, good friends, a church that loves me, an education for free.

One of these days, I will be gone.

My things will still be here, save for the important bits; my room will be clean and filled with old books and CDs, my computer will be logged off and powered down, my music will be turned off, my turntable still, my speakers silent. Perhaps I will have left something ironic on my desk: a pair of concert tickets, maybe, or a holiday brochure; a photograph, or a mobile phone; a blank diary. Would I be so cruel, even in parting? Especially in parting.

And the hole that I have ripped out of your tapestry will slowly - or quickly, indeed - be sewn over. Someone else will work the computer during services; someone else will make the class laugh when they should be listening; someone else will tend goal, someone else will partner my father for tennis, someone else will write bad poetry, quote old music, play the bass, defend all game at Risk, sing out of tune. Someone else will welcome my sister home, someone else will sit by the fire and listen to my mother talk. Someone else will hold my girl when she cries, if she cries. Should she? Probably not.

One of these days, I will be gone. If you are reading this, really reading it, then it may be today. Just may be.

And where will I be? Somewhere they will never find me, of course. I will be in New York, Chicago, Boston, I will be at Burning Man, at the Poetry Cafe, at Woodstock, I will be yachting in the Med, sailing across the Galapagos, tacking my way through Micronesia, I will be hiking along the Appalachian Trail, cycling along the cliffs of Dover, scaling Ayres Rock, I will be catching up with old friends I have never met, and meeting up with strangers I have known all my life. People will love me, and people will hate me, and most people will never even notice I'm there because, when it comes down to it, I'm not massively noticeable. Loved, hated, ignored, it won't matter - I will be me, as I have never been myself in my life. I will sing Iron & Wine and Amy Correia and Simon & Garfunkel to the wind or the waves or the woods, to wherever I am. I shall read, and perhaps I will understand; I shall write, and perhaps (just perhaps!) I will understand that, too.

There are friends waiting to be found all around the world, and one of these days I will be gone out to find them. Do I frighten you, talking like this? Good! Run home, phone home, send a letter, just to make sure I'm still there. Just to make sure you know who I really am. Can you ever really be sure?

So this is farewell! I have written it now, and that makes it fact; that makes it destiny. Not today, not tomorrow, maybe not the next day but someday, I shall be somewhere else, and the my world will have to go on turning without me; make sure you have read carefully, because this is all the warning you will get.

They say that writing is a reflection of your mind, of your soul, of your life. Well, I have been writing out someone else's soul for a long time now, and finally I understand why: if no-one knows who I really am, then that is my own fault; if I have let people mould me as they believed I would look best, then that is my own fault as well. But it is time to set the record straight; it is time to wipe it entirely clean and put a picture of a sunset in its place.

One of these days, I will be gone.

One of these days, I will be gone, and you will not even know who it is that has left you.

Goodbye.