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SUNDAY NIGHT FEELINGS

08.30.2015 / on coming and going


Hi,

A bit of an unorthodox template this week, as I am off to Spain tonight and still have not finished packing. If you actually prefer this template instead of that two-column thing, now's a great time to tell me. 



This week's feelings:



1. From Julie Beck's The Psychology of Home: Why Where You Live Means So Much:

When you visit a place you used to live, these cues can cause you to revert back to the person you were when you lived there. The rest of the time, different places are kept largely separated in our minds. The more connections our brain makes to something, the more likely our everyday thoughts are to lead us there. But connections made in one place can be isolated from those made in another, so we may not think as often about things that happened for the few months we lived someplace else. Looking back, many of my homes feel more like places borrowed than places possessed, and while I sometimes sift through mental souvenirs of my time there, in the scope of a lifetime, I was only a tourist.



2. From Moke Mioke's How to Disappear series:






3. From Lili Loofbourow's essay on "Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay", and her sister's death:

It's all too easy to lose her to the black hole that explains her—and what she did—by alienating her. Turning her into another Melina. Before we consign her to the ocean of comforting platitudes that help drown out our grief, I'd like to see her clearly as she wished to be seen. Especially since I didn't really try—not hard, not really—to see her for years.

Success isn't the point. I know I'll fail. But I want, more than anything, to see my sister's version of Lila's self-portrait. If Lila erased herself, leaving only an eye and a Cerullo shoe, what parts of herself did my sister want to leave visible, intact?




4. From Kathleen Alcott's stunning essay, "Who I Met On My Long Way Home"

It must have been my mother — a Buddhist, a tenant, never an owner — who taught me to not to fill a room with my identity, to carry my identity from room to room. I feel a little like a spy on the block where I live now, where I’ve heard the term “renter” used as a pejorative, where the lambent windows display thousands of dollars well-spent. I’m frightened by the comfort I feel in my home office: the hexagonal bookshelves I bought to store my research texts; the photo of my grandfather, a newspaper editor, which my boyfriend rescued and framed with UV protective glass. He knows I lack these instincts or don’t follow them enough, that I believe on some level that this home too is temporary. I wonder at the articles of our shared life, things as small as the thrift store water glasses in deep mauves and blues we both happened to find beautiful, the mismatched mirrors we decided would best reflect us for the foreseeable future, and hung side-by-side in our bathroom.




5. From Melissa Febos' essay on leaving, and returning, to New York: "Home"

A few days before he arrived, I drove into town. Strolling around, reusable shopping bag dangling from my arm, I felt such a powerful surge of loneliness that it almost knocked me over. I fled back to my car and drove up and down the rolling hills outside town, smelling the lush twilit perfume of summer, the smell of my childhood. All of it: the beauty, the chirrup of crickets, even the homesickness was reminiscent of some past self. Change does that. The uncertainty of moving forward jostles the sleeping lions of childhood fears: that I am alone, that I am not seen or seen wrongly. That I have made some terrible mistake. That the loneliness will last forever. “I want to go home,” I whispered, not sure what that meant.




6. From Love+Radio, a deeply moving account of voyeurism: "The Living Room":

Diane’s new neighbors across the way never shut their curtains, and that was the beginning of an intimate, but very one-sided relationship.




Okay, off I go! See you mid-September.

H
ope you get to pet lots of dogs in the interim,

Tracy 

 

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