Practically two years ago to the day, I took on a house sitting gig in a million dollar home just outside the city. I didn’t pay rent. I didn’t pay bills. A “service” mowed the lawn. A “service” plowed the snow. A “service” cleaned the house. It essentially required very little of me save for just living in the home. The trouble, it seems, was actually living there.
Flashback... I’m catching the very last rays of the evening's October sun on my new deck and sipping on a vino verde. I'm continually surprised by how much I WANT to be here. I still have my old apartment for another month and for someone who professed to love it as much as I did just a few weeks earlier - so much so that I wasn't sure I could leave it - I sure seem to be finding every excuse to avoid it. Perhaps because it's too hard to face all the packing that I have yet to do or the hole that has been left behind is too much to bear. Whatever it is, I seem to be perfectly content to rattle around by myself in this large and complicated home like some defective and deficient maraca. And still there's this small voice in my head that keeps saying, "Fraud. Fraud. You're a fraud." The source of this voice, I suspect, is also the same part of me that never feels as if I can completely inhabit this home. (Even if I walk around it a hundred times entering and re-entering every room and turning on all the lights.) The same part of me thinks this is a sign of my slumping and defeated descent into adulthood and consumer hell. But whatever rebelling forces I have in me seem to be relinquishing themselves to some internal sinkhole, though not without throwing out some choice admonishments on their way down. "YOU'RE BECOMING EVERYTHING YOU SAID YOU WOULD NEVER BEEEEEEeeeeeeeeee."
But the bottom line is this: Was I really that much happier living the way that I was? Are the hipsters I surrounded myself with and yearned to be one of really, truly all that much different than the people here in stuck-up suburbia? Take away the white belts, fashionable eye ware and ironic hairstyles and they’re just another elitist crowd. I think what I've come to realize here is that in some way - a way that I never could have understood until I got here - besides the opportunity to save MASSIVE amounts of money... I needed this kind of quiet. I didn't know. I thought I liked (and I still do, of course) the chaos of the city. What I never expected when I came here is that I would be okay in the quiet. I thought that anxiety would kick in. The same anxiety that kicks in when I try and close my eyes to sleep. The eyes close and the brain turns ON. I guess I always thought that if I found myself in a place that was too quiet, the same thing would happen. I don't mind that my brain turns ON every now and again. In fact, I sort of count on it. It's just the feeling that I can't turn it back OFF again. But what I've discovered is that I CAN just sit and stare at a lake, or the lawn flies swirling in a low, stray ray of sun. I can listen to a distant dog bark or two kids playing somewhere out of sight behind a tree and the curve of a lake.
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