‘Where do you live?’

It depends on exactly when you ask me.

I live mostly in my head. I live in the past, analysing mistakes, replaying painful memories, reminiscing about bygone days. I live in the future. A future of conversations that are always more difficult than the real event, of responsibilities whose imagined shape is often heavier and sharper than reality proves them to be. I live a thousand brilliant imagined futures. I live in different countries, doing different jobs, with different people around me. I preemptively miss my life where my body currently resides.

My body lives in Bristol, mostly, though it travels the country and beyond on occasion. It’s briefly lived in many places. Some of those places became a part of me, and I never leave them. They come with me in my head and heart. 

My heart is a roaming creature. It’s painful when your heart wanders, separates itself from your mind and body. Often the pain is brief, deep and beautiful, a testimony to how lucky I’ve been, how lucky I am, how many lives I could live. 

Why do I live? I live for the moments when my head, heart and body are in the same place. Those moments I feel utterly alive. I become aware of how brief my life is, how it simultaneously doesn’t matter at all and matters more than I can imagine. I think of my place on Earth, of the Earth in space, of the vastness of time. But it’s not a thought. It’s a feeling. A feeling that fills the body, mind and heart. Perhaps that feeling is the soul.

I live for that feeling.