ON SPATIAL ROMANCE

Proximity is never experienced objectively.
Memory enters.
So does mood.
Habit.
Desire.
The person someone is.
The person they were.
Perhaps even the person they imagine becoming.

Surroundings participate.
Light matters, until it doesn't.
Beauty occasionally has very little to do with it.

Familiarity is equally unreliable.
Something previously unknown can produce the peculiar sensation of recognition.

Small things become strangely persuasive.
Occupation makes its own alterations.
Objects migrate toward usefulness.
Preference settles into habit.

Habit leaves evidence.
Environment keeps record.
Later, memory becomes selective.

Adjacencies become uncertain.
Yet some inconsequential detail remains perfectly intact.
A temperature.
A sound.
What survives is rarely what was considered important at the beginning.

Similar imprecision in choosing where.
Practicalities establish the perimeter.
Then something slips through.
Attention wanders from what a place provides toward the life that might occur inside it.

Possibility begins arranging.
Morning develops a routine.

The decision may still require making.
The introduction has already occurred.

-VLE