I’ve been thinking of how important it is to be bored in beautiful places. Not purposefully but incidentally, to exist in spaces so lovely that when you’re bored you have that, at least.
I don’t do very well with boredom; when I was younger, I would spin and spin against myself before slipping into a migraine. I’ve always needed to be doing, my body somewhere my mind wasn’t. Slowly, of course, I thought I’d outgrown this need to supplement my own company but I’d simply found ways to silence it.
Now I’m electing it, choosing to be bored; picking it up in the morning and sitting with it, noticing the drag of time, fingernails on a chalkboard—almost oppressive—like cooking timers, how they sound out each second, a metronomy of restlessness. I could never own a wall clock—those old ones with the three blades swinging—to wake up in the middle of the night and hear it tick-tick-ticking strikes me as capitalism’s self-flagellation. The electric token meters? I can’t stand them for the same reason, because sometimes I will wake up and imagine I hear my neighbor’s, 3 floors down, beeping in that shrill inescapable way.
But.
I’m taking to it better now, maybe because I’ve started napping in the afternoon, stretched out on a patch of sunlight like a housecat. Then it doesn’t seem too bad, allowing time to undulate, unrolling like a beam over me.
maktabani 