While being a person, being a friend to someone, being a cog in the grand machine of nothing in particular, I remembered today that an apartment sits perfectly set up in another city, that a life sits gathering dust. I thought of this like how you often think of a long lost memory on a bus ride or as a plane begins to take off, and what I mean with this is how the reminiscing only happens because between all the movement, you have nothing to do, and I think this has been a day like that, where I was moving continually, but I was disengaged like a disinterested student in a class he could not wait to get out of. All I wanted throughout today was to wrap it all and write. The rest of the day felt like a prelude as if it were setting some great last riff up in an album full of songs you wade through until you get to that one song.
Now, it is one in the night, and I am finishing this piece in the dim, ochre glow of the lamp that has a million colours to show but which, out of habit and out of routine, is stuck on this soft, warm one. As I write this piece, the somewhat heavy duvet pressing my already tired feet down, and as I try to look at myself at this moment like you often do when you try to capture the whole scene so you can remember it later, I begin thinking about how I never imagined a moment like this: glasses on my face, not many but a countable number of greys on the sides of my head still, and a life where everything has begun to fall into place. It is not lost on me how sinuous the path has been.
To be happy in the moment brings about a different silhouette in a person. It is always easiest to spot this person amidst a crowd. The other day, I sat in a cafe and read for an hour, and then, when I got up to leave, it occurred to me I had been swaying to the music playing there as I read. Now, this is a normal thing to do, I am sure. It is, however, important to me because when I was nineteen, I saw a person doing this in a cafe I was trying to write in, and I remember feeling a wave of innocent envy tower me.
“I wish I could be like that free someday,” I remember thinking then.
The other day, it occurred to me that I am.