Life, Living and Loving: Mrs. Feve’s Memoir Project – Space

Space. The final frontier. These are the… oh, wait, yeah, I’ve been a Trekkie since the show first aired and hearing those words still give me a pleasant feeling and when I saw this theme, that was the first thing I thought of.

There’s personal space. Not enough space. Too much space. There’s space that are places and if your mind goes to the gutter, I won’t blame you for that one. Indeed, one of the things that flashed through my mind was being able to have sex in a small, confining but populated space… on a Greyhound Americrusier bus, in the back of the bus, not only with the guy who decided he wanted to sit with me but, um, quite a few of the women in our immediate area.

Three of the best days I’ve ever spent on a bus and thanks to a drink made from passion flowers, um, I don’t remember a whole lot of it except it was a lot of fun.

Space between words. Single spaces between paragraphs. Space is empty yet not so much because even in the void of space, it’s not so empty as it looks. There are the wide open spaces that once made me, a city kid, wide-eyed with wonder and awe. That bus ride I mentioned? I remember what I saw as the bus proceed to its stop in Cheyenne, Wyoming. No wonder that area of the country is considered Big Sky and God’s Country. Just space. Lots of space. Beautiful but somewhat desolate and lonely; the mind tends to wander, to take in all that space and, yeah, sometimes it can make you feel small but a part of the whole.

Space in terms of slices of time; being in a good space and then in a not-so-good space from one millisecond to the next only to return to a good space and, yeah, even the space of time I had to think about what I’m writing and I did have a lot of time and space to think that Mrs. Fever made this a somewhat tough topic because the word “space” conjures up all kinds of thoughts and memories that are difficult to fill or, really, to put into the single space of coherent thought and focus.

And, yes: I was all in the gutter thinking about the lack of space inherent with sex; the closeness, being able to physically a part of another person as humanly possible and being in a space where time has no meaning and so much that a mere ten minutes can feel like an hour or an hour seems to pass by in mere minutes. I thought about the head space in being in the moment, which is a space all to itself. In that space, there is no before and there is no after: There is only now. The space between mind and body even when the body is, again, primally and carnally close. Even the space between what is moral and what isn’t in these moment, you know, depending on what floats your boat; that space seems vast and insurmountable… yet, there’s not a lot of space in between that which is moral and that which is not so much…

And depending on how much space you put between yourself and those who might not agree with how you occupy that space and/or who occupies it with you.

The space between breaths; the space between the blink of an eye; the nearly immeasurable space between the neurons firing in the space that contains our brains that allow us to think and feel and remember. Time and space is so closely related and not so much and there is always the space between one memorable moment and the next.

The space between seconds. The space we wrap around ourselves that can comfort those who are allowed to be in our space while excluding those who can’t or won’t be allowed into our space.

Jeez, Mrs. Feve – could you have made this any harder?