Finding Home

March is quickly coming to an end. I spent last night in a new apartment and I can't help thinking about the whole affair like a camping trip. I'll be camping out in these four strangers apartment for a month, maybe two. Sleeping in a loft, where if I wanted to I could rest my feet on the ceiling. Surrounded by boxes and bags containing the bit of my life I decided, when leaving Maryland, to take with me. Moving does sneak in this unexpected perspective, these covert thoughts, I begin flirting with contraband ideas- to purge. Can I part with any of these things? Can I part with any of the little material treasures that carry my life in them? To become more portable. There are people in my life who would, probably, love for me to reduse the amount of things I own. Mainly people who have suffered through helping me move said things.

I feel a bit like an invader in someone elses private space. Like I have carved out a sphere in their center for my world and tread out paths as needed through their lives. In that moment last night when we fell silent, when every last needed movement had passed and for the first time I could hear beyond my time and space I felt alert to theirs. The gentle sound of someones music passing through the wall, a reminder. It was like my ears were the most active part of me, the one sense that keeps me most aware of the presence of others unseen. That gentle music was a brass orchestra to my sense of reality. I feel my little life surrounded and my actions a ripple in someone elses pool; I'm up in the tree, going about my business gathering nuts and each one that falls disturbs their water and in that moment I am frozen in a state of awareness. And I will do no more than pass by them briefly.

I anticipate the next move will be more drastic. That I will end up outside of my little Williamsburg life and into something entirely more remote and less full of youth and energy. A new phase will begin. No longer propped up from the outside by the fortune of my family I am intrigued by the prospect of living within the means I am able to support. I am attracted and afraid. Attracted because in a sense it seems right and I've never done it. Afraid because it will be hard and uncomfortable in many ways I expect. What parameters can I realistically set and achieve? Can I make a rule of renting somewhere with a dishwasher? What is the average cost of utilities and electricity? I suppose a couple months at just over 600 in rent can help me gage if that is the right zone for me.

In my dreams I never do find home. It is that most illusive of searches. Constantly repeated with largely the same results. I wander an unfamiliar world in a lost state. It represents a desire to return which is the true reason I never find home. How can we return to something that is the past? Somehow I have to make a new home for myself. In every space I occupy there is the effort to "find" home. So I found home for 9 months in Apt 303. Somehow I will find home again for a month or two off of S. 5th street in the shadow of the JMZ line as it arches over the Williamsburg bridge, simultaneously beautiful and imposing.