When I first moved to NYC awhile back, I’d heard of a band called, “Homesick for Space.” I loved the name because there was never enough room for anything in New York, and I thought that everyone who lived there was probably homesick for space.
Tonight I was packing up to leave the place I’ve been living in Santa Monica for half of this year, never to return to the space again. I became a sobbing mess, tears running down my cheeks as I washed that particular dish in the sink for the last time, as I washed my hands in the upstairs bathroom with the overhead lights on for the last time. It is weird how attached one can get to something as nebulous as a space, and the way one is accustomed to interacting with it.
What is the significance of space, anyway? This house could be torn down, and yet the space in which it has been built would remain. What could I possibly be sentimental over then? Does this place contain memories, like some sort of vessel? Or what is it about being in the space that triggers my mind to recall those times?
Here, I healed, wondered, I wrote and wrote and wrote, I dreamed. I dared to think of things. New things. Things I hadn’t thought of before. I wandered. I explored the crevices of my mind. I watched the light shift and change, I watched the sunset. I wasted a lot of time here, in this house. I watched a lot of movies, I pondered a lot of art that had been created by others. I let myself meander, and I let myself be morose and sad and scared and lonely and I didn’t plan, and I didn’t think beyond tomorrow.
And, I had weird insights and revelations, and for brief moments, I glimpsed the thought that maybe nothing was as we thought it was. I explored some abyss of the psyche I am normally afraid to even acknowledge, and so even though I say I was sad and scared, really, I was brave enough to think of things I would normally think crazy. And when you face what might drive you crazy, it opens you to not be afraid, any more, of what might lie within.
How could such variety of existence be contained within these walls? These walls that hold my sorrows and my hopes, my worries and my biggest dreams. Am I simply projecting the confines of my human existence onto this space? Am I crying because I know I am grateful to be housed in this human shell, alighting here and there, and finding new and intriguing things even when I least expect it?
It is an incredibly vast existence we abide in, and somehow comparing that with the confines of any space makes emotion swell within me, like something might overflow. It isn’t that I love it here. It is that I saw life here in a fresh new way. Life, in comparison to “here,” was fresh and new and reborn. It is time for the next place in life and in time. It is time for the next love, for the next reason to feel homesick. While memories flicker somewhere in the twilight, somewhere else it is beginning to dawn.
