Large Rooms

I was walking home and thinking about the impending move that will eventually happen, and how disorienting it should feel to know that you will not settle into the home you are in. We (and by “we", I mean me, I'm just lumping you into my experiences. Lucky!) have gotten used to this quasi-nomadic life of moving from home to home.

I think about families raised in the same small apartment, say in New York, where they live for their entire lives. I wonder how they do that and not begin to feel claustrophobic, how they don't begin to feel smothered by the walls and the belongings that make up the place that shelters them from the outside.

I think, generally speaking, that we (again - lumping y'all in) tend to jump to larger and larger places. It's difficult for me to remember the cozy feeling of me and Biffy's tiny one bedroom in San Francisco. I only remember that stifling, claustrophobic feeling at the end, like I was in a moldy, but somewhat comfortably furnished prison cell.

And then I wonder, 'cause this is how my mind works, if we who were raised in the American west have adjusted to so much wide open space that that's how we feel comfortable.

But then, like a bad dream remembered the next morning, I think about large rooms that I've been in and how they begin to make me feel uncomfortable as well. If I'm in a room that feels too large, I begin to feel as I can only assume that those people who fear leaving their houses must feel, like there is not enough to keep me contained, like I may actually pull apart in all directions.

But then I began thinking about how beautiful it was to hear the Dead doing And We Bid You Good Night all a capella and sweet.

Apparently my mind likes to derail itself in mid thought process...