Of All The Places

In the first episode of ABSTRACT: THE ART OF DESIGN, Netflix’s design/art-version of CHEF’S TABLE (or maybe it’s the other way ’round), illustrator Christoph Niemann spoke of moving to NYC for the first time, that it was “his place” (a paraphrasing of his exact words, one that I hope leaves the beautiful idea intact) and that we all have them, that first time moving somewhere without friends, without family, to where we must build ourselves and our careers to find that home of becoming; out of all of the remarkable insight included in the documentary, it was that little idea, a tossed-off remark, that struck a nerve.

In spite of the knowledge if not the acceptance that my life is here now, 9.6 miles away where I started – almost two decades removed from my initial escape to Boston and staring down the outset of what I fear may be a midlife crisis or at least the continued growing pains of the search for that “second wind” – and experiencing it, this place of my creation, in different and wonderful and frustrating and infuriating transmutations, I feel as though a part of me is gone, as though part of me has been in an enforced exile. Compromised – or maybe synthesized. I don’t know.

While I know that the first “My Place” can only live in a pining for a past that probably never existed, I want to believe that the intrinsic spirit of becoming and being unmoored contained therein can be reignited through the combustion of what is and what was but I’m not sure that it can be; perhaps it can only exist in here, in memory.

And all I can do is press on.

(In the meantime, be sure to check out ABSTRACT. It’s quite good.)