I’m supposed to be moving sometime next week but I suddenly feel incredibly unsteady about the whole thing.

Like the city I meant to be heading to isn’t really where I want to be.

Ideally, I’d like someplace quiet. With a lake and trees. Some place quiet where one could be alone. Some place like Montana, or a small island out in the French Polynesia, or Mars a couple hundred million years ago. I keep imagining myself walking out to a front yard with a few houses scattered down the street. Maybe there’s a pond not too far down, fifteen minutes on a bike give or take. My neighbors busy themselves with mindless tasks common to towns of the sleepy type. There’s not much to do here and that’s the way its been. Thats the way it’s always been is what we’d say to passerbys taking the scenic route.

Wouldn’t be too far fetched to say there’s only one stop light in town. It’s one of those towns where in the time it takes to inhale and exhale you’d be in and out. Might seem small but just beyond the city lines is an expanse of land so vast it’d almost feel like the rest of the world was an acre in our backyard. We’re only small because we don’t believe in taking up too much.

I used to dream of towns like these when I was young. Its a mystery as to why that was because I’d never been to one growing up in bustling south Florida. It’s probably why The Sound of Music became my favorite movie as I got older. All those rolling hills. And it’s probably why I felt a pang of nostalgia watching What’s Eating Gilbert Grape a few days ago.

Nostalgia of all things.

What’s funny is Gilbert hated his hometown and the way he felt trapped by it. Like he had nowhere to go.

That’s how I feel, but not in relation to this town but in relation to the world as whole. Like we’ve got nowhere to go. But nowhere is exactly where I want to be. My own private slice of nowhere far from anywhere and everywhere. I think people who think this way are cast off into a group of those who are either too overwhelmed by the pressures of life or too simple to want anything more. I’m neither of those, and I don’t think its simple. Its kind of extraordinary really. To want to leave everything behind and freefall into nowhere. Takes more guts given most of life we do things out of fear. Work for fear of financial ruin, love for fear of loneliness, and live for fear of death.

I want to be nowhere and make a folktale out of things remembered but might soon be forgotten. Stories we’d pass down orally until they became tradtion etched into stones we skip down the river. Some place I’d see my refelction in snow covered hills, some place that would make even Michael start a war so that he might be cast out from Heaven to take a walk down below.

Some place.

Some place that isn’t any place.

Some place like nowhere.