A physical space keeps existing when empty, with nobody watching it, but it’s not truly mine as long as I’m not there. It belongs to the latest version of me that inhabited it. And I used to feel this as a terrible loss. I’m becoming a guest in my own former home, while still tightly clenching the keys to my chest.

Wherever I go, I crave the intimacy I used to take for granted. I need to find a way to gain the right to new spaces around me, so I can start moving freely. For a while now I’ve been postponing roaming. I live my days filling up the same familiar, default box and I don’t even notice that in a way, I’ve shrunk. That the roof over my head is slowly caving in. That this room is gathering dust. When I finally get up and make the conscious choice to let my small body wander, as I go, and watch, and notice, I start building invisible structures and reference points. It’s like annotating a book. Or populating a map. The borders expand and the mundane gets injected with novelty. Injected is the perfect verb for this. It’s sudden and painful, but I finish my walk, 2000 km away from what I used to call home feeling full.

This year for my birthday, I’m gifting myself a manual on how to better fill up all corners of my being. Because that space is rightfully mine and I’m claiming it back. I have space for everything. Around me and inside me. There’s this voice talking even when my mouth is shut. And I am so much bigger than this room. Or this brain.

“Make time for space”, from Writing as Material class, Basic Year, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, 2023

How important is place

Small Spaces