The November project 2019, part 13

I pick a flower and dream about midsummer nights. About how I’m at a party somewhere on the countryside and meet a person who for someone is a best friend, but a stranger for me, and the two of us just work instantly, like a chemist who accidentally knocks over one substance into another and creates something new, revolutionizing, that goes down in history. I pick a flower and dream about running through meadows, into woods, swimming in lakes, sitting on mountain tops. I pick a flower and dream about how one day they stand outside my door with arms full of roses, another day we live together and have pot plants in our windows, a third day we have grown a whole garden full of flowers. I pick a flower and dream, without having any actual plans on how to find that kind of person.   I write a paper and ponder about phrasing. About which words to write in the search bar to find useful articles to analyze. About which angle to give the whole thing. About what questions to ask at the interviews. I want it to be perfect, I want to get the highest grade. I want it to be something others will use when they study. Something that will give me a job. This is gonna be so damn good. I just need to figure out what to actually focus on. I keep pondering. I scroll among housing ads and contemplate whether it’d be worth it with a balcony, if I need a dish washer, if it’s more important to prioritize location and if I should save more money in order to buy my own place instead of renting? I sigh over the market and what it has become, think about all those people who can’t look for a place in the same way I can but instead have to take whatever their wallet can afford. I think about the racism, segregation, gentrification, the renovictions*. Finding your dream place is something only a minimal piece of the population can do today. We’re constantly on the hunt for something better, or at least we wish we had something better. Not to mention all of those who have to move multiple times in a year; who rent rooms, who live in sublet apartments, always so insecure. Will we ever find peace? I drive on unknown roads without knowing where to go. Am I even going somewhere? I probably just want to get away. Get a look around. Find new neighborhoods, new friends, a new job, new direction for my life. If my friends saw me now they’d think I was crazy. Go to therapy, they’d say. Get help. Moving to a new town won’t solve all your problems, for your problems aren’t bound to a house wall. I know they’re right, but I still ignore them. At least for now. I just want to have a moment for myself. To keep looking. I look for security, the life where I feel at home, comfortable and content, but somehow it’s as if it’s the searching itself that gives me the sense security right now. So I keep looking. searching*Renoviction is a combo of the words renovation and eviction. I don't know if it's a phenomenon aborad, but here it's common for (private) landlord comapnies to wait with renovating until the current tenant has moved out, because then they can raise the rent by far more than the usual annual raise, and they can't do that while the tenant lives there. A cruel way to create gentrification.