Goal

I'm experimenting with the recent Material Design pattern - Backdrop.

My goal is to include the search bar into the header of the front panel, but I'm not sure on how to create an affordance to exit out of the search mode.

Attempted solution

I tried putting the left arrow to the left of the text field, as it is implemented in many other places, but it doesn't make much sense here because no screen transitioning happens.

I also tried replacing the arrow with an exit cross, but I'm afraid that the users might confuse that button with the "clear text field" action, besides, I'm planning to put that action to the right of the text field, so having two crosses seems confusing.

Question

What would be the clearest way to indicate a way to leave the search mode?

The design is going to be implemented in an Android application.
Here is a demonstration of what I have now:

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