pieces

There was some kind of pulsing addiction to this new place I called home. I think I loved the pieces of it. I loved the unpredictable degrees of strangeness that the city wholeheartedly embraced. There was so much variety in just one pocket, there were vintage shops and there was bold pink hair and these big beautiful trees that cast shapes of shade in the park that had no children. There were old brick buildings and hues of the sky that I had never seen before, there was live music and there were colors and feelings that I knew were the living veins to the heart of it all. It was no surprise that I also loved the pieces of my life that were specifically mine to own, mine to adore, mine to carry. I loved my clean bedroom and I loved my cluttered choices, and I loved that in the lost chaos there were people I had found. I loved that when I drove to work, I could see the mountains. I loved that here, in this city, I wanted to understand the art exhibition with all of the confusing paintings, because I loved that the learning curve was so steep, that the snow was so cold, that the air was so thin. There was a moment recently where I was overcome with a feeling of belonging and I smiled at a baby girl sitting on her father’s shoulders. She smiled back at me in this knowing way and I was surprised that she did because I thought she was too young to understand or return my gesture, but she understood and returned it, and in that moment I thought that perhaps I loved this new place so much because this new place had loved me back. More than anything I loved that when the frozen river finally melted and it was warm enough to ride your bike, I was on my own in this city where the mountains sit behind it, and at home. 

the house

I was thinking hard as we walked up the creaky stairs. The oak floors and the white trim combined with the startling vacancy of the house made me feel like I was walking into the scene of a movie, like this empty house was my stage, like the windows and the walls and the rooms without any furniture were waiting for me to do something, anything, to make it movie-worthy.

At the top of the stairs, we parted ways. He in the first room, me in the second. He was handsome, which was my favorite thing about him, because it’s nice to have a handsome man who you aren’t actually attracted to around. Handsome men offer things that less handsome men simply don’t have; they have lying eyes and magenta lips and five-o-clock shadows to die for, all of which you find yourself entirely indifferent to, all of which make you feel, in some odd, twisted, accidental kind of way, more powerful. There is something to be said about resisting the aesthetic charms they know they have in their arsenal. I felt like if the house could talk, it would agree with me. It was an agreeable kind of house.

I walked into the third empty room with the big windows. There was peacefulness in this room. I wondered if it was the very visual and overwhelming unsettledness, the blatant, intangible amount of emptiness that demands this centered sense of self from within when you least expect it. No bed, no table, no books, no clothes, no life.

Just you.