Unknown Spaces
My fascination with elsewhere
I’ve always found some chance to look up. Every childhood home, either climbing to the roof or splaying myself against the concrete driveway at midnight. Every apartment, catching a glimpse on the walk inside after a night out or stepping onto the balcony at dusk. Even on hazy drunken evenings downtown with friends I wouldn’t see again for ages, I’d look up past the smog and light pollution and clouds until I found something, anything, that sparkled. Just one glint was enough to entice the feeling of complete obscurity within me for hours. It didn’t matter who I was with or where, once I looked up I was a goner. Suddenly, nothing around me was important. The only feeling that took over was a yearning to be anywhere but where my feet were planted. Didn’t matter how happy I thought I’d been moments prior, or how distracted I’d felt. All I could think about were the people in those planes going somewhere, while I was stuck here on the ground, glued by gravity and a seemingly intangible sense of insistent burning for more.
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One home in particular, the home that laced together most of my early childhood and adolescent memories, housed a sunroom, and when I occupied the second floor in my late preteens, once the foundation had settled and I heard no more stirring below my feet, I’d crawl out of my own bed and sit on the daybed- or night bed rather- staring through the wall of windows past the neighbors houses and the lights of the town. And where I was, the town wasn’t big enough to pollute any light. I’d see all the stars I could recognize by name and like clockwork the sky would blink and I’d be consumed.
I go days, weeks even, without looking up, because I know that once I do I’ll get locked in a trance. In a never ending obsession of who could possibly be up there, where they could be going, and what their own lives or childhood had been like. Sometimes the feeling sticks with me for hours even after I’ve left the sunroom or the yellow stricken streets. It dampens and saturates me all the same. It creates an atmosphere of hazy saudade that moves with me throughout the day. As if I must exclaim, “Why is no one addressing the humidity in the room?” If I don’t stop myself before looking up I’ll stay awake all night about it. I avoid it so as not to disrupt my day to day activities. This is the very reason for my absences from school and work, which have always caused me trouble. I get so sick about it that living a routine life begins feeling phony. There are people in the sky and I’m expected to act as if I’m not full of wonder and dread and a longing to be everywhere at once.
It’s not necessarily the plane or the people in said plane that cause me such longing, but more so what it represents. The possibility of endless, yet unapproachable opportunity that creates this open pit of avenues. To know that the world is brimming with consciousness, and I cannot seize it all. I’ve always wanted to hold the entire world in my hands. It’s been my downfall since birth, destined to live a life of pursuit.
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I often drive down the suburbs of my city at night just to catch a glimpse of the spaces others call home. I twist my neck to see what they’re watching, how they decorate their walls, how coordinated or messy they are. These unknown spaces. These houses I’ll never get familiar with, I’ll never grow up in and call my childhood home. People I’ll never know or have a connection with. Sometimes I’ll catch them dancing. Or a couple curled up watching tv. Christmas trees still lit in February. Family photos too small to make out the details of sit on fireplaces. It’s the ultimate footprint of humanity.
I often wonder, when I see these homes- much like when I see a plane or a library or the stars- why I wasn’t the one destined for those glimpses of Earth. I wish I were big enough to fit them all inside of me like an encyclopedia, to flip through the pages whenever I like and find myself within a strange world I wouldn’t know otherwise. There are moments happening within the world I will never experience and my soul can’t seem to accept that fact.
I often think about how I want to be omnipresent, but unaware of the fact that I’m omnipresent. I see a stranger and immediately wish to swap lives with them just to know something new. To see something from someone else’s eyes. I am so enraptured with the mystery of unknown spaces, unknown backyards, unknown conversations. I feel I should be there. I am respectable enough to be there, I tell myself. I could have that conversation with those girls in the bathroom. I could swim in the Pacific Ocean without ever having seen it. I could insert myself into any situation and act accordingly, if only just to blend in and observe.
My desire to be bigger than myself culminates when I look at airplanes flying by. A sense of flaming curiosity washes over me, and a loathing of my limited consciousness fills me with both dread that it won’t- and hope that I could- someday be someone worthy of having a face, being a body, and sharing a new experience with the world. I could be on the other side of that curiosity contained within who I was in that sunroom at midnight when everyone else was asleep downstairs with their curtains drawn.
I think what I’m saying is I’ll quite possibly never be content with the way things are, but I think I may also be okay with this. While I have my moments of deep fervor for the unknown, and while it used to torment me with despair, I find myself more often than not these days grateful when I get curled into contemplation. Excited to observe what’s in front of me, to be the only one with my tiny perspective of this world, knowing that someone may be feeling that very desire to look through my eyes.
This insatiability within me only speaks to how much I crave to experience. How much I want the whole world all the time, and if I can only catch a glimpse, whether that be as a child looking out of her sunroom at midnight, or driving through suburbs, or sitting in my living room at twenty-four, still looking out at that same sky, then I’ll soak in as much as I can of this. I’ll silently thank the universe for granting me this slice of itself.
The sun rises and sets each day as it always has, and with it, I grow older as gravity takes its toll on my body and my skin, and there is only one universal truth. That we are alive, and we are here. And to be stuck inside one existence will be the largest limit humanity will know.
So in order to save myself the frustration and potential combustion of sheer ardency, I must pretend all that is in front of me is all that exists. I must tell myself this is all I have. I must be grateful for the mundanity of my life. For my struggles and no one else’s. For the sunset I catch a sliver of from my balcony only when I stand on my tip toes. I love these things and I live them as much as anyone can truly live at any given moment, but there is a deep rooted seed inside of me craving to live more, to search deeper, to look up. I’m not sure I’ll ever satiate it.
There must be a word for wanting to swallow things whole.