Mood: Alive
Listening to: Ceremony by Twin Tribes
It is pretty much right in the middle of winter now, and we thought it would be a great time to take a short midnight walk and listen to goth. It was a great time to do that.
Have been wanting to get into more music lately. Rock music, specifically stuff with darker themes like goth rock, darkwave, other alternative stuff. But am not sure anything's going to be able to do it for me like Twin Tribes.
Am so reassured that I belong in the night and in the darkness after this walk. Now, part of why I like the night so much is simply because of the peace and quiet. If we lived somewhere where it was quiet during the day, I don't think we would have nearly as much of an aversion to it. But I think even then we would prefer night time.
One of the few things we definitely would miss if we moved out of the country is walking at night in the suburban residential (aka single-family home) areas around us. Of course, I wouldn't want to live in one, and I think this type of city planning is less than ideal, but there's something about the way I am surrounded by buildings in which people are in, but I'm usually the only one outside, and there are few cars.
Have had many different, yet related thoughts and feelings similar to this one over a few years, and during this walk I was able to put a label on it: I think we're fascinated with places.
Am not sure exactly how to describe this but I will try. For example, I consider myself to be a fan of liminal spaces. Photographs of places that should contain life, but instead are devoid of it. A place that was built for a purpose, but at that moment, just simply exists. Somewhere that used to have a person, but is now just lonely. An empty basement. A room connecting a door to a stairway.
I love strange places, and mysterious places. I love that slight fear of not knowing. Rooms that were built just off enough to not be consistently usable. Buildings that were abandoned a long time ago. A lone window lit up red in the distance. The night casts a shadow over everything, making everything seem stranger and more mysterious.
And I also love untouched nature. I love the idea of going to somewhere so far away from any other people, and just existing. This is part of the reason I have an interest in places like the Arctic and the Antarctic, mountain ranges, and deserts. People travel and they go to places with lots of other people, learning about culture, having fun, and eating food, and I want to do all of those things too. But I also want to just walk and walk and keep walking until I end up somewhere so remote that it doesn't even have a name.
That being said, I love naming places. I like being the one to give a place a name, because the name I choose will say something about my personal relationship with it. Places have names so that they can be referred to by people who are communicating. But there's no reason I can't just make up my own name for somewhere that I've been to, for my own use. It's a way for me to use my creativity, to express the way I look at the world. (Such as unaffectionately referring to my city as "Ennui City".)
I find great value in the aesthetic and atmosphere of a place, and am interested in how that shifts depending on what you change about it. As for me, I happen to enjoy places that are darker and that have less people. But I will also enjoy a place that has lots of people much more if I have my own personal space, like a restaurant. A place's vibe changes depending on what's inside of it, how it's lit, what time of day it is. I suppose you could call it a kind of art.
You ever look at a house and just wonder if anyone's ever spent their childhood there? If you're looking at a place that's been set deep in someone's memory as where they spent the first moments of their life that they remember? And what their experiences were? I ponder how memory changes a place too. I have memories of my backyard from when I was a child, but that place means something to me that isn't quite like anyone else's view of it. I have my own emotions attached to it, and my mind has warped it with passing time, painting over it again and again until it's almost unrecognizable even to other people who have been there before.
There is something attractive to me about the places that are special not necessarily because they are ornate, or because they are tied to history, or because they serve a great purpose... but because they simply have a certain vibe, whatever that may be. Any place can be special to someone, no matter how small or seemingly ignorable it is. And I just think that's cool.
Thanks for reading, this one was a lot different from usual and I didn't expect it to end up in this sort of format, but it's probably more interesting to read, I don't know xD
Have a good night, spooky friends~
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