Buy a ticket, pack a bag: in Ndrek Gjini’s “Fugitive,” leaving first looks like a small practical errand. The speaker announces, “Yes, I can go. I can leave right now,” then reduces himself to an itemised list—flesh and bones, clothes, domestic things. The syntax makes the physical self little more than luggage, weighed and transported. A plane or train ticket seems enough to move ten or fifteen pounds of flesh, some clothes, a few necessary objects. The farewell trails off into ellipsis before “goodbye,” as though the speaker is already beyond the sentence, halfway out the door.
The poem turns on that small word “However.” What follows undoes the confidence of the opening. Memories and feelings are called “disobedient”; they never leave, and the speaker “can’t dictate anything to them.” The language of command is important. The first stanza dealt in things that can be counted, bought, and carried; the second deals in inner forces that refuse orders. Memory is not luggage. The speaker can purchase a ticket for the body but cannot issue one to the mind. The line breaks become more irregular here, and the statements grow longer, as if the speaker is caught mid-thought, trying to explain something that will not settle into a neat list.
The construction reinforces that split. The poem has no rhyme and no fixed metre, but it uses short lines and abrupt turns to mimic the rhythms of someone reasoning aloud—confident, then hesitant, then almost pleading. In the opening stanza, the phrases are clipped and transactional: “Yes, I can go. I can leave right now.” After the turn, the sentences sprawl across lines; “They never leave, / and I can’t dictate anything to them” spills past the tidy confidence of the ticket. That single word “However” works like a suitcase dropped in the doorway, interrupting the easy inventory. Even the goodbye is unfinished, and the poem’s pauses make the reader feel the speaker’s uncertainty about what part of him is actually departing.
The final stanza delivers the poem’s central image: “It’s just a heft of myself / escaping from fighting with me.” The word “heft” suggests weight, bulk, burden—something lifted and carried. The body becomes cargo, a heavy fragment rather than a whole person. At the same time, the pronouns split the speaker in two. The “I” who speaks watches a “heft of myself” leave, while the “me” at the end remains locked in a fight. The phrase “escaping from fighting with me” is deliberately tangled: the body is not simply leaving a place; it is fleeing an internal battle, a war the speaker has with himself. The title “Fugitive,” then, applies not to a person crossing a border but to the body running away from the self that stays behind.
The poem’s quiet power lies in its refusal to romanticise departure. It presents travel as easy, almost mundane—a ticket, a bag, a quick goodbye—but treats memory as something that cannot be packed or left. The speaker can go, yet cannot be gone. That paradox gives the poem its weight. Physical distance does not automatically create emotional distance. A body can change countries, cities, houses; the memories and feelings remain behind, disobedient, refusing to follow. The poem is less about a journey than about the impossibility of a clean escape. The real fugitive is not the person who boards the plane or train. It is only a “heft”—a heavy piece of the self—slipping away from a fight that cannot be won by movement.