Foreign and familiar

I haven’t left my bubble in almost three months, everyday I explore the area between the same three villages and once a week drive ten minutes to buy food. This is the smallest my life has ever been, the most static and contained. Everything I need, or everything I’m allowed to need is within the four walls of my house. I’ve got used to not having a reason to leave.

But I’m not claustrophobic, there is so much space between the three villages, more than enough space to walk and run and think for months.
I like the world and the roads in between, which are both foreign and familiar.

When i think about before ​All This​, everything feels too spread out, too big. Friends in far flung places, always somewhere else but never out of reach. I don’t miss travelling between towns and cities, spending hours on buses and trains just because I felt like I was missing out and the place where I was wasn’t enough. There were so many options, too many people to see, too many things to do that nothing ever felt like the right thing. Everything felt disappointing and distatisfying, like I was constantly chasing my tail trying to be in the right place at the right time, while ignoring the looming feeling that I was always wrong.

For once I don’t want to be anywhere else, I’m in the right place.
I’ve conditioned myself to be dissatisfied with peace and quiet, to look down on the small town but I want to be a small town and not know about the big city.

I think we all know too much about nothing, too much about other people’s lives. Nothing and nowhere is mysterious, everything and everywhere is mundane and banal. I don’t want to hear about other places except for in abstract, mysterious terms. I want other places to be alluring and aloof and intangible.

I need to be able to believe the grass is greener somewhere else but that’s impossible when faced with the humdrum reality of knowing everything about everyone.
I want to know less and wonder more, everything seems too certain. Well maybe not in these Uncertain Times.