Place

I have this dream of an isolated lifestyle. Who could be better suited for it, right? I don’t keep friends very well because I tend to live in my head, floating through days doing such and such until I realize I haven’t talked to another human being in a week. I don’t decorate places. It pains me to even take my books out of boxes because I know they’ll have to go right back in eventually. I’m restless within two weeks of a new place and I either become fidgety and explosive or lethargic and half a pulse away from dead.

I have dreams of the country, of driving to a house in the middle of a gigantic field of flowers and moving in, scattering my books on all available spaces, waking in the morning (at dawn, of course) and sitting on my porch with coffee and a notebook, making no plans, just observations. No one will ask why I don’t want to get married or insuinate my relationship is less than because I’m not. (Though this won’t matter, as I’ll be alone in the stone house, which is no slight to Chris, but just the way happy places work.) There will be no one to say, “Why are you doing it that way?” and I won’t have an urge for a neat, contained life that I can’t maintain. Life in the stone house will be erratic, but clean and loved without question. Everything done there will be natural law. I will not wear shoes. I will not clean up water if I spill it. Learning will be by choice; speaking, just as much so.

But then I think – fun for one day, right? Relaxing for a minute, but what then? So I insert a city five minutes away, over the hill. I can drive there if I want for drinks and music, but my home (stone, with a vegetable garden in back) is waiting for me and when I get sick of the smoke and the yelling and the people who constantly want things, I go to my house and crawl in my huge white bed with my five dogs and three cats and I sleep like a newborn until morning. I want that house.

Today I sit in an apartment that’s cozy by any means, but too small and filled with stuff for my taste. It’s in a nice neighborhood, though it’s loud with the police sirens and the jackhammers and the traffic on the busy street. In the mornings, my porch is my laptop. The city is always here, bragging and stompy outside my window, slapping me awake in the mornings, demanding attention each second of the day. I have dreams of packing a suitcase. Of landing anywhere and adjusting, as long as anywhere involves water nearby and no threat of war or obligation. This is why people work jobs they hate, right? To find their own stone house in a field? Or, at least, this is why people go on vacation. Except I don’t want mine to be vacation. I’d like to snuff out my desires, and work at a bar in a one-bar town, as long as I have that wide, wide porch and those five crazy dogs, and the city over the hill, a place like the cool rich aunt who’s fun in small doses. But you don’t have to live with her.

Someday, someday. One morning! I’ll wake up without the alarm, and find the suitcase. Then the car. After a while, I’ll see the flowers, shadowy and questionable. But then! The light, the house, the animals waiting behind the door. Another life.

Posted by: Zosia | 07-21-2006 | 01:07 PM
Posted in: General | Comments (2)