This Place Yawns

Due to living a way out in the countryside and doing most of my socializing in other, more lively, more developed locales, I never have that very many people stay over at my apartment here in Furubira. I mean, it has happened, it’s just that, until recently, my apartment has felt like a pretty solitary place. Not in a lonely way, really, just in a private way. It was my space, and there wasn’t any problem with me being the only one to fill it.

And then my father and my brother (and, at times, Sonomi and Lindsay along with them) came here to stay over the Christmas/New Years break. My expansive apartment, thankfully, had room enough for all of us.

However, I didn’t realize just how fully all those people filled the place until I returned to it after I’d left my father and brother in Tokyo.

In the absence of all those people, there seemed to be a tangible emptiness at the centre of the rooms in this place. They were the same rooms they’d always been, with the same furniture they’d always had, but they’d had those people filling them with their life for so many days that the rooms now seemed to be hurting for the people. It was almost as if I felt the absence of the people as something present in the rooms of my apartment.

And it’s no different today, after a weekend spent in Furubira with some of those excellent people who helped me decide to stay on here for another year. They’re some of the best people I’ve met over here, and they lent their scents and their energies to the apartment for a weekend.

Now, in their absence, the place seems twice as large and twice as quiet. For the first time, I find the leisurely, me-paced, solitary existence that I’d happily accepted here in Furubira for the past five months start to show signs of wear. Back in Toronto, it would often seem as though you couldn’t keep me in my apartment. I’d always be off, trying to socialize with someone. After years of that, I managed to adapt rather well to the introverted social vacation that my sleepy town has provided. It was a rest, and I felt like I needed it.

But now, I wonder if the combination of never-ending winter and good friends has finally gotten to me, setting off the first blush of cabin fever. Thankfully February looks to be shaping up as the busiest month yet in terms of weekend social commitments, so I won’t have to worry about getting too squirrelly by being shut up in my town, in this apartment that seems to be getting only bigger by the day.