Living in a new place

I am living in a new place for the first time in my life. It's strange how the mind gets used to things through constant exposure. Sometimes when I'm moving around Muncie I feel as if I've never lived anywhere else, and as if Muncie were the only place in the world. Sometimes I have to strain to imagine that somewhere else in the world there is this place called Auburn, where I have dozens of family members and friends who I miss - and where some miss me - and that life in Auburn continues to go on without me. It's as if I could be placed in 13th Century China and in a matter of weeks forget where I'd come from and feel completely at home there. It's not that I don't miss Auburn, but that the eating and the drinking, the taking of showers, the sitting in my office, the seeing familiar faces, and the forming of routines in Muncie dulls my mind to the differentness of Muncie. It's when I think about Muncie being as far from Auburn as England from Spain maybe, and might as well be England from Argentina, that I realize how far I am from home and how this peculiar idea called space separates me from a life of 24 years in Auburn, all my family and upbringing. But even space means little to me anymore. The first time I rode on a plane I went to New York City. That was six years ago. I felt like I had traveled to the ends of the earth, that when I stepped off the place I was in a different universe where there were people who spoke English even and drank starbucks. But as I've traveled more and more space means littler and littler. It was when I was in Australia, with it's different constellations and Antarctic winds and I saw people there also, drinking startbucks and speaking English.

And so living in a different place is not as strange as I thought it would be. I might as well be in Auburn.