I'm sitting in front of my computer (yes, it's working perfectly fine again after the near breakdown on Sunday), and I have so many thoughts going through my mind I don't know where to start. I've been thinking a lot these days about my life: about the things that make me happy and the things that would make me happy, about the things that make me sad, about the things that worry me (needless to say, the latter two seem to have taken a lot of space in my thoughts). Right now, I have no idea where I will be a year from today. I have no idea where, why, how, with whom, for what reason. When I think back, if someone had told me last year that I would be sitting in an appartment in Frankfurt just as I am today, and in the situations - private and professional - I am in today, I would've probably said: no way. But the situation was different last year. Although I had just finished my studies. I don't know why. Sometimes I think I want to change too many things at once.
I feel like I have no home in the world, no other than maybe the 168cm of my own body and the galaxy of imagination and memory in my head. I'm not particularly a "home bound" person, I mean, I deliberately chose to leave my childhood home right after school, and I've been moving ever since. But the difference is that back then, I was still moving away from something. From home. Now I feel like I'm just moving. Nothing to return back to. Well, that's not quite true, of course, but it does sometimes feel that way...
Interesting thing is this: I never thought I would be so attached to places. When I think of the house I grew up in (which was sold a couple of years ago), I get quite sentimental. I really miss that house. I really miss returning there, the feeling of knowing every goddamn corner: The scratches on the wooden doorpost of my father's office where each year my brother and I would be measured, standing rigid and straight and breathless, pressing our backbones against the hard wood. The staircases layered with the hundred, nay, thousand times I ran down up and down, often times getting an annoyed yell from my father. The colour and pattern of the big carpet in the living room, into which after a couple of years the marks of the furniture had engraved themselves. The darkness of the brown bathroom tiles. The weird kind of back-room space behind my parent's bed that hid piles and piles of carton boxes with I don't know how many things in them. The blue bedspread of my parent's bed. The identical, light wooden IKEA furniture my brother and I had in our rooms, and how it felt when I used to press my hot body against the cool wood of the bed in the summer.
I think it was Cicero who taught the art of memorizing by imagining houses: by gradually moving through a house and placing the things one should remember (a list of numbers, a text, etc.) in a particular place, you were supposed to be able to recall an endless number and the most complicate kind of things. As if the visual, three-dimensional imagination was to enhance the sharpness of your memory. Maybe this is why I am attachted to places after all, these days.
I feel like I have no home in the world, no other than maybe the 168cm of my own body and the galaxy of imagination and memory in my head. I'm not particularly a "home bound" person, I mean, I deliberately chose to leave my childhood home right after school, and I've been moving ever since. But the difference is that back then, I was still moving away from something. From home. Now I feel like I'm just moving. Nothing to return back to. Well, that's not quite true, of course, but it does sometimes feel that way...
Interesting thing is this: I never thought I would be so attached to places. When I think of the house I grew up in (which was sold a couple of years ago), I get quite sentimental. I really miss that house. I really miss returning there, the feeling of knowing every goddamn corner: The scratches on the wooden doorpost of my father's office where each year my brother and I would be measured, standing rigid and straight and breathless, pressing our backbones against the hard wood. The staircases layered with the hundred, nay, thousand times I ran down up and down, often times getting an annoyed yell from my father. The colour and pattern of the big carpet in the living room, into which after a couple of years the marks of the furniture had engraved themselves. The darkness of the brown bathroom tiles. The weird kind of back-room space behind my parent's bed that hid piles and piles of carton boxes with I don't know how many things in them. The blue bedspread of my parent's bed. The identical, light wooden IKEA furniture my brother and I had in our rooms, and how it felt when I used to press my hot body against the cool wood of the bed in the summer.
I think it was Cicero who taught the art of memorizing by imagining houses: by gradually moving through a house and placing the things one should remember (a list of numbers, a text, etc.) in a particular place, you were supposed to be able to recall an endless number and the most complicate kind of things. As if the visual, three-dimensional imagination was to enhance the sharpness of your memory. Maybe this is why I am attachted to places after all, these days.
3 comments:
hallo,
can i be the first one to stain your immaculate blog with a comment? okay then.
Are you really 168cm tall?! nee...! 165? I would say so, 'cos I am 165 and you're not taller than me.
Anyway, I like how you write quite freewheelingly but still maintaining some sort of logic. And i like how you manage to stick in your own private thoughts and daily-life stories, literary references or philosophical comparisons.
xxx
p.s: i linked your blog to my blog far whatever that matters.
okay i just realised i wasn't the first to write you a comment.. but the second! oh well..
Dear Domx,
Right. I will explain it to you one more time: I am PRECISELY 1-6-8 cms tall, that's 168 cms as in one-hundred-sixty-eight centimetres or 1 m 68 cm if you prefer. I believe that I am even taller in the morning when I wake up (rising to such unlikely heights as 168,5 or 169 cm). In any case, I let you figure out whether 1) maybe you are 168 cm as well, and we are thus the same height; 2) you are 165cm and thus smaller than me; 3) we're in fact both 168 mm tall and inhabitants of Lilliput (that's what I think, btw).
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