sinking in

I have moments inside myself, like crystals in a geode.

In the darkness enclosed by my skin, I contain precise matrices of different places, times of day, and certain turns of feeling (the emotional equivalent of turns of phrase). None of them are memories; rather, they are plans for the future. The basic elements are a specific kind of place, a particular time of day, and varying circumstances that engender an exact emotion paired with an essentially singular schema. They are all, to a one, open-ended dates with deja-vu.

One of the most long-lived moments is being alone in a dark room at night with a city outside my window, and feeling as though I were in a shell, nestling alone within multiplicity, gazing out across endless vistas while feeling extremely conscious of my corporeality. It's a cozy sense of isolation within dense population, of ownership of my own little corner to curl up in, of being able to observe the vibrant life of the outside world without being a part of it. Key to this sensation is a realization of the distance between me, the means of access, and everyone else.

I get this feeling every night in my new bedroom, which is the room furthest from the front door. As I prepare for bed, I shut the bedroom door, turn the light off, and open the blinds as far as they'll go, and drink in the light and the life and the night and the walls and the window and the ceiling and the floor and think I am here.

It's not something to which I readily admit, truthfully. It sounds odd and most likely will be perceived as though it were some sort of a psychological problem, the pleasure taken in utterly shutting myself off while still keeping an eye on everyone else.

The more I've thought about it since moving in last week, though, the more I realize that the crystalline futures I have hoarded within myself depend wholly upon an understanding of space. Vast spaces or close places, they nevertheless involve both a widening of my world and a constriction of my personal space to the area circumscribed by my feet.

I found a similar feeling the first time I took the Metro into the District. I only stopped at Union Station and Dupont Circle, but it was a feeling of liberation and also of myself among many. It happened again the second time, when I took it to the Mall and found myself at a loss for choice. Museums all around me. I wound up spending three hours strolling around the Museum of Natural History, in no hurry to get anywhere, knowing home was only two train rides away. It's a city. A world-class city. And it's mine to explore, to carve out niches, favorite places, that I can go to again and again and sort of snuggle myself into. It's a new home I can appropriate. Like taking the reins of a new horse and finding its rhythm, learning how to lean just here and just there to make it go just so.

Unfortunately, work prevents me from really settling into the city properly just yet. Fortunately, I have a four-day weekend coming up, an eleven-day holiday at the end of December, and another four-day weekend a couple weeks after that. It's almost as though I'm a parasite who just found a new host body, as sort of human-shaped Toxoplasma Gondii who is attempting to make a city more interested in the cat-urine of my comfort.

Or something. Either way, that moment which I've held inside myself for many years has now achieved its final actualization, so the move has become a sort of liberation in another, quite unexpected, sense.