11. Icahn Saelao // mychestisempty
“You never stay in one place for too long, do you?”
I sat there and thought for a minute. It didn’t feel like a thousand years or an eternity, but a full minute; sixty seconds of pure thought.
She stared at my hands as they pathetically attempted to rub away the imaginary layer of crust that hides the molten red ink underneath. Where others may get that feeling of their heart breaking, I instead resist such an inward pain and I turn it outwards; instead, it is my hands that ache and break. My hands did so again, this time with a magmatic force that caused her ears to crack at the sound of the turmoil her question induced.
It occurred to me that I have never had much of a place to call my own, nor a space that I’m sure a lot of other people could conventionally call a “writing space.” I have moved more times than I would like to admit, and it has gotten to a point where I keep all of my belongings in boxes in anticipation for the next move. At the beginning of autumn, I counted my life in boxes. I never stay in any one space for too long.
I once spent a winter writing in a closet in a friend’s house because it smelled like wet trees after a night of fresh rain; strange how the first time I ever felt “at home” was in someone else’s residence. One day, however, the odor became so thick that it drenched anything that would step foot inside; so just like that, in less than a season, I put my life into a box and moved on. There was a Summer in the last spring, and I wrote on a hidden park bench with her at my side. For a season, I had this feeling that maybe this will last; but Summers always have a way of leaving on their own accord, don’t they?
So what is my writing space?
It isn’t the desk or coffee shop I furiously and frustratingly type at in an attempt to appear vain or profound. My writing space isn’t the room in my childhood home that was taken away from me on Thanksgiving of last year.
I realize I have learned a way to adapt to life and its ephemeral nature, and even though there is no literal space where I can sit, think, and write, I know my writing space will always be with me. I can proudly say that I take my writing space with me wherever I go, and it isn’t even the forty-three dollar pen I bought or any one of my three black spiral-bound notebooks; I do not carry nor sit in my writing space.
This is my writing space.
