Crashing

For a few months there, I was living at one place after another for short stretches of time, but each time it was long enough to almost get fully invested in the place. I guess we're supposed to call that 'couch-surfing', even though I was sleeping in my own bed in a bedroom each time. It wasn't too bad, although it wasn't ideal either. I'm happy to be in a stable place where I live now, and my family's home (where I was over the holidays) is still like that also even though my bedroom there disappeared a long time ago.

What's tough is sleeping any place where I will be for as little as a day or so and maybe just a bit more. It might as well be a house of eggshells I'm in considering how gingerly I walk for the time I'm in such a place. Even in the home of a good friend, I'm in a kind of paralysis. Oh, it's basically fine as long as that person is accessible, but they eventually will go to sleep with a few perfunctory advisements about the place. The fact remains that I don't know where almost anything is or how to work the things I can find. I try to just not touch anything if I can help it, as I certainly don't want to do any harm. Perhaps partly as a result, I tend to not sleep very well in such situations. I'll do anything to get back to my own bed if I can.

All that aside, there is a certain kind of good feeling in crashing at someone's place for a day. Maybe it's a kind of romance like one sees from Caine of 'Kung Fu' or Zatoichi. Of course, I don't ever find myself in the middle of a local gang feud, but the tumbling, wandering feeling is a mildly pleasant one. In a way, I wish I were less laden with things and relationships, so that I could travel light and move fast, never knowing what I might do and where it would bring me. I talk about that being basically true in the morning light, but if I were a wanderer, the possibilities would happen.

The way I really feel is probably somewhere in between the second paragraph and the third. I'm not comfortable crashing, and I suppose most people aren't, but being comfortable has paid off less than being uncomfortable in my experience. Opportunity never comes into my bedroom. It always insists that I leave the house and diverge from my own predilections. I fully believe that a willingness to sleep on a couch in someone else's home on account of circumstances no one intended may well result in some great break that. Of course, others crashing at my place is a separate matter, and one maybe worth visiting in future.