how a space becomes a home

on rediscovering intimacy with personal spaces

There were two suns in the sky when I was a child; one would sink cool and white into the horizon and the other would come dancing out from the first like a dark pit moving through the center of my vision. I haven’t stared at the sun since I was ~eight, I should clarify. The sun tends to leave its mark on our childhood starings in a blaring contrast to the moon’s soft pillow white. When I was small I thought the moon followed me, and I imagined the two suns would dance around one another, both in their rising and in their setting, even when my vision had healed from having just recently stared at the setting, an invisible battalion of bespectacled men had climbed ladders into the blue carrying hammering nails and a circle painted blue to re-seal the sky.

I wore my first pair of prescription eyeglasses when I was around nine, with a previously unregistered astigmatism, and prior to this grand, rollicking discovery of corrected vision everything had been a mute, blurry aura. With glasses everything became focused, details emerged. I noticed how many leaves there were in the trees and the grain in wood.

Maybe the lesson of how to let our personal space come into proper emotional focus, one of the real projects of our lives, is to fill it with wood. This is a joke. There are as many answers as there are people. But if there is a wide-reaching answer to such a vague question a part of it must be in the details in our lives and how our imagination takes them in.

If you’re reading this post you’re reading Substack newsletters for its novelty. That’s not a bad thing, — we have so much choice in the media we take in that it would be fair to assume almost everything we consume is novelty in some way or another. We self-select what we consume, I mean to say. I read Substack newsletters because they take me back to reading cardboard crates full of comic books in the backseat of my family car moving across the country, short form and snappy content that sizzled. Superhero comics of the 80s and 90s were incredible. The color work was stunning. The dialogue read like a really good MF Doom sample. These posts are a short-form attention to details, a taking in for yourself and your imaginative powers the fine lines of prose here and throughout the site. You make them yours. And Substack feels intimate for this reason. Reading too, as a whole, is best when taken as a part of intimate space in which you can feel comfortable taking in the small details, feeling bored enough within them to concoct your own internal metaphors, analogies, similes, etc.

Memories of long roads and trips remain for me whenever I happen to drive myself through the midwest winter. I drove through Minneapolis recently in the early winter and recalled those memories of past feelings of privacy in the backseat of Toyotas. I thought about discovering The Beatles, I thought about discovering Sufjan Stevens, I thought about discovering (sigh) Kanye, through iPod headphones while I played Pokémon Pearl on a Nintendo DSi. A car is a mobile place where I can feel at home now, with all this nostalgic weight that’s built up for me and such an attachment carries on with me forever in the place between known truth and self-mythology. What a remarkable thing that is!