I am relieved that I could finally pull together a song about moving on from the old apartment. It’s not always easy to find things to write about, especially when you live a pretty solitary lifestyle. You usually have to look a little deeper at the things that really mean something to you. If a lot of those things seem kind of mundane, you have to stare into them until you penetrate through to some meaning. It really doesn’t feel like it matters anymore. As long as you are close enough to something, you might be able to show an insight. Anything can be wonderful if it can be truly personal and real. And told in the right way.
Moving house is one of those things that is both a big change and also a pretty widely experienced event. Yet, there aren’t too many songs about it. There’s maybe ‘Sun In An Empty Room’ and then…
I spent a long time thinking about picking up and heading out in the months and weeks leading up to our moving. All the wide facts snaking through my brain in thick cables, orbited by every subtle implication, spinning off, discovered, and waiting to be. Very difficult to maneuver through with any grace, and so easy to slip through cracks and get lost in. This is how I mostly experience and process of change. I am unable to dodge or run from the infinite reflection. It’s only healthy to think stuff through and look back for a while. To avoid that responsibility to yourself is dangerous in its own way. My problem is that my mind over-indulges in reflection, going far past the point of usefulness, and sometimes so unnecessarily deep that the light starts to thin and the scale of things can warp out of proportion. I was so deeply worried, I didn’t want to forget anything about the place that had been the one consistent backdrop for the last couple of years of my life. It’s not the place, so much as the years of your life that feel so truly precious, and that’s what I get sentimental over. Not that I can’t live here anymore, but that those years of my life are drifting away and across a break in setting, over a threshold where just the place can no longer be looked at on its own to extract memories from.
Maybe this is what familiarity is, a continuity that ties you together.
The place meant a lot to me through the lens of everyday life, the mundane and un-noteworthy ninety percent of seeing, feeling, breathing, and living. No less than the exciting remainder, blasé only in that there is just so much of this beautiful side of life that we sometimes forget how to enjoy it. A sheer plane that you need to glimpse the edge of sometimes to even know it’s there. When you approach the edges of the everyday, that is when you make out the definition. Moving house is one of these such edges, a miniature death of a version of you that in its last motions sees its entire life flash before its eyes, mourning itself before it is even gone.
Quit Vision 