I’m not new here. I was once, but not anymore. Five or six years ago this place scared the hell out of me, made me question every decision I had made to get up to the point that brought me here. A day not unlike today. Bright with sun, quiet and small in a large world. The same familiarity, swinging through that same well-understood corner of the map. A place for you. But on some warm days, the calm, consistent, everyday breeze motions you out a little past your comfortable depth, catching a window of the world just beyond your boundaries.
That day I didn’t stand away and watch from far off, tilt my head and follow the action with my eyes. That day I couldn’t observe from behind distance or glass; I fell through the window. I woke up in my single bed in my old bedroom, ate breakfast and watched TV, looked out at a series of unchanged views like framed paintings. The same scenes from the closer end of childhood remain almost exact, while over the years their meaning to me slowly and imperceptibly warps alongside my own panning perspective. I am taller now than when we moved here, I am no longer ten years old. When I was ten years old I never considered what it would be like on the day I moved out from my parent’s house. I may have been more prepared for it at that age, of course not practically, but in my brain, still wide open. I was just as qualified then to wake up in my single bed, eat breakfast, watch TV and look out the windows. Many times I’d climbed into the back-left seat of my parent’s car and watched the world whoosh by. My dad, in driving us anywhere we needed to be, exercising a trusted skill that I couldn’t really comprehend the complexity of. Even at nineteen, still paying as much attention as when I was five to a constant you just stop noticing.
On my fifth birthday, I received a lego rocket ship set with light-up thrusters. I was used to people watching me play with the gifts they had brought me on the four other birthdays I’d had by that point. As I pushed together the bricks in a morning-lit end of a room my memory struggles to define, no one had a chance to watch me for long. I was so excited that I truly didn’t care. At some point one of my parents came in needing me to stop and pack up the set, or for me to go outside while they packed away the pieces. I must choose a single item to take with us from our collection of garden toys. I don’t remember what I chose, but I do remember wondering why we couldn’t take them all because I liked them all. I still used them all. A sense of loss for molded plastic and good play. That was the strongest emotion I felt towards moving away from the house I was born in. At that age, a place is just a place.
Quit Vision 