To Float or To Squeeze

The world is blanketed in an almost 6 am light, soft and grey. The streets are misty. The sky sways the way everything sways behind cloudy eyes when you just wake up. Except I am just going to sleep, or trying. I lay in a bed cradling myself, perfectly square white pillows under me and on either side of me. The bed is just under a window, and my head is haloed by the honeymoon light of dawn. The room is small and white, there’s room only to walk on one side of the bed. The ceiling is slanted. It is quiet, but I’m listening to music soft in my earbuds. I feel like I’m sinking. 

When I was younger and I was in the pocket of something out of the ordinarily special, my mom would tell me to close my eyes and squeeze everything out of the moment and into my brain… the smell, the temperature, how windy it was, details of what I saw.

Going to bed at 6 am in Copenhagen was not the kind of moment I usually want to remember. I wasn’t experiencing incredible joy, or gaining a different perspective. I wasn’t standing on a cliff in Marblehead listening to crashing waves or running after my friends, laughing on Mission Beach. Instead, it was an intrinsic appreciation, a to-the-bone tranquility, a subtle understanding between me and the world that I could be unaware of everything bad for twenty minutes while I sunk into sleep. 

Earlier that week Tess and I were in Amsterdam: we are walking around the city, saying very little to each other. One trailing in front of the other, so entrenched in observance, then noticing the other isn’t nearby and slowing down to wait for them. The sun is shining, the cold air is flirting not chilling. We walk through a tulip market in a central square, there are two teenage boys playing the trumpet, bikes are whizzing by. I feel like I’m in the intro to a music video before the music starts playing and everyone breaks into dance. In the center of the square, there’s a bell tower, and the bell chimes echo through the finely tuned acoustics of the finely tuned city. 

These two containers, the one in the room in Copenhagen and in the square in Amsterdam hold the same contents in me; a peaceful functionality, an understanding that being can feel like floating and not squeezing, sometimes, when you get it right.