The Places I Had Planned for Us to Go

One month from today I will leave Reims and France.

In a few months London will take over, six months there, then six in Brussels. After that, a blank page. Or maybe the kind of page that bleeds through when you press too hard.

I’ll have a degree, a couple suitcases, and a more accurate sense of how long a goodbye really takes.

Friends keep asking what comes next. I tell them I don’t know. I say it so flatly the sentence sounds true, even to me. What I really mean is that I’ve stopped trusting the word “next.” I’ve watched calendars fold in half, watched plans slip like receipts you meant to keep. Forward sometimes disguises itself as the same hallway you’ve already walked.

However, what truly hurts isn’t the exit stamp.

It’s the list taped inside the kitchen cabinet: the restaurant I never went to, the coast‑to‑coast train ride that stayed hypothetical, the park bench two streets over where I promised myself a full afternoon with a paperback. Ghosts of possible days that never happened. I guess I was too busy telling myself I would have time tomorrow.

There’s a café near the cathedral that smells like burnt sugar right before closing time. I always imagined taking someone there. Showing them the way evening light leaks through the stained glass onto the floor, turning silverware into small, bright country roads. I can describe it in detail, yet the scene never took place. The empty chair is still waiting, but not for me anymore. Sooner or later a different pair of elbows will claim that table, and the memory will belong to strangers who don’t know they’re borrowing a dream. My dream.

I keep thinking about shelf space: how a future collapses down to objects you can drag across a border. A frying pan that never felt like mine, a poster roll that keeps reliving the same journey in reverse. The heavier items are the invisible ones, the sentences nobody said because we thought we’d have time, the private jokes that never found their audience.

When I try to picture London, the image glitches. It’s hard to paint a skyline on wet paper. Brussels is even murkier, all fog and maybe. Yet I know my body will get there. Bodies are good at arriving; it’s the mind that resists, pacing the platform long after the train has left.

Sometimes (more than I admit) I imagine returning to France after my undergraduate. I wonder if the streets would recognize me or shrug me off like a former tenant who left dishes in the sink.Is one year long enough for something (or someone) to forget about you?

Paris raised a version of me I can’t access anymore. I still catch myself using “genre” like punctuation, still complain about things I secretly adore: small, durable habits, proof that places never quite give themselves back.

So what now? New plans, I guess. Fresh scaffolding to replace the ruins. I’ll sketch them in pencil this time, light enough to erase. Maybe I’ll fall in love with Brussels‑rain against steel tram tracks. Maybe I’ll hate it and leave early. Maybe I’ll circle back to Reims and find the bakery has changed owners and the baguettes taste wrong.

All I know is this: the life I imagined will never happen. Something else will. Something always does. That thought stings and steadies in the same breath. I carry both sensations, the loss and the open space it makes. They fit in the pocket of my coat like two stones, uneven, unavoidable, strangely comforting to touch.

If you pass through Reims after I’m gone, please sit on that bench in the park for me. Read anything. Or read nothing, just let the afternoon settle. The moment will belong to you, but I’ll feel it anyway.

Goodbyes bend time like that. They stretch, they return, they never quite finish.