Radical Closure

Today you try writing outside your apartment. You walk to a small neighborhood café, order an iced coffee, and take a seat at one of the wrought-iron tables on the covered deck. You can tell at once that it is not an ideal writing space: there are no power outlets, and the conversations at the tables around you are loud. But earlier, when you made the decision to come here, you reasoned that you would be more productive in a public space. Above all else, you told yourself, you had to get out of the apartment. For the past few days you had locked yourself inside, and you had not written a single word. Now the apartment was too haunted by your failures—too haunted, in a word, by self-hatred—and you already knew how a work session would progress at your desk. After opening your laptop to the blank document, you would stare at the screen for hours, possessed by the same thoughts that you had been thinking every day. Idiot, you would think. Failure. These were the thoughts that haunted your apartment. You could not sit down at your desk without thinking them. Just as a ghost, you imagine, must repeat its dying words for eternity, so too were you doomed to repeat these thoughts. It was as if some part of you had died at your desk, and now you were the ghost of that moment. If you tried writing there today, you knew, your mind would simply pick up where it left off yesterday: caught like a specter inside this eternal loop or hesternal circuit. No, the apartment was out of the question. Whereas the café, you told yourself, was an un-habituated space: you had never worked there before, had never developed any previous patterns of thought, positive or negative, and so it was possible that the shock of its novelty would defamiliarize the blank document, allowing you to write at least one paragraph. And even if you failed to write, you reasoned, it might be refreshing to fail in new surroundings. You had to get out of the apartment. You had to leave that suffocating structure behind. But now—as you open your laptop to the blank document and take the first sip from your glass of iced coffee—you understand that you have left nothing behind. Idiot, you think. Failure. The self-hatred is as strong here as ever. You are thinking the exact same thoughts here as you would have been thinking at your desk. And so it is as if, you reflect, some part of you still is at your desk. As if, while your body is at the café, your mind has remained behind in the apartment. Thinking its apartment thoughts. You should have known that it would not be so easy to escape. Your mistake lay in conflating the apartment with its physical dimensions: its walls and hallways, the thousand square feet that it occupies in space. In addition to these, you realize, the apartment must possess something like psychological dimensions, a state of mind that you generate around yourself.