We all have moments from our childhood that we revisit. Rebecca Solnit beautifully spoke on this, writing that she has been wandering through her chidlhood home every now and again even though she'd left it at age fourteen. She was still there in her dreams.¹ In my case, act i is a sad paragraph in an otherwise fine childhood that I revisit often. It is a moment that I can vividly recall, and could still feel when I wander the same path in my hometown.

In some way, it brings me comfort to give it a poetic place, especially in this writing style. It helps pinpoint the specificity of emotions in space over time, while also leaving room for personal interpretation. One could be reminded of own associations with classrooms, similar contexts; could get lost in thought through it. My writings are inspired by BOG², who have written two eponymous bundles in a similar manner, almost exclusively using verbs as the driver of the story. The writing takes on its own kind of rhythm; accelerating, slowing down, repeating. Wielding this self-interpretable rhythm, I sketch out various spatial experiences in this article, embedded with ephemera of thoughts, feelings, sensations. To me, it seems that little storytelling is necessary, as the spaces, but also the objects, can create a sudden mental shifts, a crossing.

"Why do these little deaths // make me happy?" questions Joan Mitchell in her poem Joie de Vivre.³ It seems that human nature wants us to feel, to put ourself in situations where we potentially lose something, in one way or another. That is not to say that the aim of painting the wall was to be disappointed with the loss of authenticity. However, as Solnit put it, we could shift this loss from losing something to getting lost as losing things is about the familiar falling away, while getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. We could embrace this disorientation and come at ease with getting lost.

However, in our modern digital society, we are flooded with stimuli and excitement, pointing us the way to positivity and comfort. Additionally, with the efficiency of everyday movement, from Ubers to Google Maps, disorientation becomes a thing of the past. It seems that more and more people have a feeling of where they should go, as long as you see your cursor on the digital map, while you perhaps do not even know where you are. When you always have the comfort of knowing where to go and where you are, being disoriented can become quite uncomfortable.

In writing, reading, thinking, you can learn again to understand what it is to be (comfortable with being) disoriented in the moment, not being led by your phone to tell you the way, how to read something. Moreover, I personally prefer texts that are less direct, wander around a topic first before landing on a conclusion, that hide the subject matter for a bit. The technique of veiling in writing, for example through the use of metaphors, can turn reading into an act of love, nurturing your thoughts, letting you wander through/between text and thought.

Similarly, these five acts leave blanks, to be filled in, to be interpreted. In connecting the words that remain to previous experiences you've had in certain spaces, a crossing occurs. Your mind associates memories from the past with experiences in the present, as your childhood home might still cross your mind every so often . During this crossing, it is possible one could experience danger, as Byung-Chul Han put it in Saving Beauty,⁴ a sense that your body does not want the crossing to happen as you don't want to get lost. However, when you embrace the seemingly dangerous disorientation, the associative process of getting lost can become more comfortable. Finding comfort in disorientation could help us redeem the original meaning of comfort, which means 'to strengthen',⁵ instead of its modern connotation of convenience.

Thinking of spaces that you reminisce of often; what is it that draws you back? For me, it usually concerns rooms with character. Informed by Han, character stems from the meaning of a sign that is burnt-in, the irremovable branded sign. Learning from this definition, character is not (necessarily) something aesthetical, but rather something that space is embedded with, given to it, with which it is overgrown.  Spaces gain character through various external factors, whether they are memories, events or have undergone physical afflictions, received tender love, been inhabited.

It is the spaces that are imprinted or weathered by experience that I come back to, where I find the magic/tragic of the everyday. It is something associative and therefore highly personal, but the discomfort of getting lost in them is a shared experience. To become more comfortable, is however very personal again. For me, writing these spaces and moments, eases the revisiting, to envision the tints of white in the plain-coloured wall. I invite you to start embracing your version of the elevator's suspense, the yellow blanket that is molded to the shape of a shared bed or, with time, the sidewalk in front of the bakery that is forever imprinted with the broken garage.

‍References

1. Solnit, R. (2017). A field guide to getting lost. Canongate Books.

2. BOG. is a Netherlands-based theater collective that provides 'uncompromising, idiosyncratic and open theatre for today's seekers'. The collective has written two bundles, BOG. and BOG.2 (among other works), both being produced over a span of 10 years, concerning bigger life themes such as birth, puberty, first break-ups, moving out, et cetera. www.bogcollectie.com

3. Mitchell, J. (1992). Joie de Vivre. [lithograph on paper]. Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom.

4. Han, B.-C. (2018). Saving Beauty (D. Steuer, Trans.; English edition). Polity Press.

5. Giedion, S. (1948). Mechanization Takes Command. New York: Oxford University Press.

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