Foreign and familiar
I haven’t left my bubble in almost three months, everyday I explore the area between the same three villages and once a week drive ten minutes to buy food. This is the smallest my life has ever been, the most static and contained. Everything I need, or everything I’m allowed to need is within the four walls of my house. I’ve got used to not having a reason to leave.
But I’m not claustrophobic, there is so much space between the three villages, more than enough space to walk and run and think for months. I like the world and the roads in between, which are both foreign and familiar.
When I think about before All This, everything feels too spread out, too big. Friends in far flung places, always somewhere else but never out of reach. I don’t miss travelling between towns and cities, spending hours on buses and trains just because I felt like I was missing out and the place where I wasn’t enough. There were so many options, too many people to see, too many things to do that nothing ever felt like the right thing. Everything felt disappointing and dissatisfying, like I was constantly chasing my tail trying to be in the right place at the right time, while ignoring the looming feeling that I was always wrong.
For once I don’t want to be anywhere else, I’m in the right place. I’ve conditioned myself to be dissatisfied with peace and quiet, to look down on the small town but I want to be a small town and not know about the big city.
I think we all know too much about nothing, too much about other people’s lives. Nothing and nowhere is mysterious, everything and everywhere is mundane and banal. I don’t want to hear about other places except for in abstract, mysterious terms. I want other places to be alluring and aloof and intangible.
I need to be able to believe the grass is greener somewhere else but that’s impossible when faced with the humdrum reality of knowing everything about everyone. I want to know less and wonder more, everything seems too certain. Well maybe not in these Uncertain Times.
