Another Intermezzo Place

"love is the distance / between you and what you love / what you love is your fate" - Frank Bidart

Welcome to The Flâneurs Project. This post is part of our Longing for Places series. I am always so happy to interview people about the places they love - you can book a time slot here if you want to share your stories, or if you simply want to connect.

Astronomy for Amateurs | fig. 56 Fire-Ball seen from the Observatory at Juvisy, August 10, 1899

Intermezzo: in music and theatre, an entertainment performed between the acts of a play; also a light instrumental composition.

Last night I suddenly remembered that my initial plan after leaving my home country, Romania, in the autumn of 2015, was to return a few years later and build a home. I never intended to leave for good.

Almost nine years later, I am still gone, and I know with some certainty that I will not return. As I write this, I’m enjoying the lingering excitement of acknowledging something that was always obvious to me but that I never fully digested: ever since leaving Romania, I have lived in intermezzo places.

I choose to define an intermezzo place as a place, or a series of places, that feel like short stays or breaks on our way to the place we want to commit to for a long time, or, as I defined it in another post, the place that we cannot escape. If you, like me and many of my friends, have lived in different countries throughout your life, then you’ll have a clear image of your intermezzo place(s).

Berlin was my first temporary place, a city chosen purely for my studies, which slowly turned into a place where I saw myself growing old. I remember vividly how it all began, but I don’t know for sure when things went astray. One thing led to another country, and then another country, and then to the city where I currently live - The Hague.

I don’t see myself as a nomad, even though I have lived in four countries over the span of nine years. It's mainly because I was completely enveloped in the cultures and languages of the places I lived in, celebrating them, and enjoying the things they had to offer. I furnished homes, built things from scratch, paid taxes, worked hard, and poured love into the homes where I lived, hoping to find myself forgetting to leave.

How do we know that we are in an intermezzo place?

Some of us know for sure that we are not in such a place. In a recent interview, I asked Russell a question about the city he would move to if everything was taken care of for him. He answered:

I would stay in Louisville. Most of my family lives here. We returned here when our first daughter was born for a reason: to return to the place we knew as home. As T.S. Eliot wrote in Little Gidding: 

We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time. / Through the unknown, unremembered gate / When the last of earth left to discover / Is that which was the beginning.

Some of us know that we are currently in an intermezzo place and already have a clear answer about where we could head next. I asked a friend who lives in Vienna, Olga, the same question I asked Russell, and she answered:

… San Francisco, because I think that's where many of ‘my people’ may be found. I'm lonely here. Vienna (and Austria more generally) pushes weird people out like the body rids fingers of splinters – they are foreign materials.

Her answer reminded me of another friend who recently committed to San Francisco as his next place to live, and I remember how excited I felt for him. This excitement triggered something in me—an awareness that I might have struck upon some sort of answer to a question I hadn’t dared to ask until now.

Intermezzo places are fascinating because, for a brief time, they seem like forever places. For all of us who keep moving around the world, they are places to pause and build, and rethink what’s next. I have to admit that sometimes I am afraid that I will keep living my life like this, every two, three, four, or five years unrooting myself and building anew. Maybe it’s the only way I know how to live by now, or maybe I always chose places by chasing something else, and not the place itself.

Yesterday I finally committed to moving again and betting on a place that feels so out of reach at the moment, I can barely see it in sight. It’s not a move that will happen this year, not even the next one. It’s a move that started yesterday and will unfold over the course of months, years, until one day I will finally arrive.

All I know for sure is that more people, myself included, are finally committed to accepting, as Frank Bidart beautifully puts it¹, what they love as their fate. Even if that means chasing a wild bet in terms of a place to call home. Even if that means, like in Russell’s case, wholeheartedly admitting that we already arrived a long time ago.

image source: unknown

up or down from the infinite C E N T E R
B R I M M I N G at the winking rim of time

the voice in my head said

LOVE IS THE DISTANCE
BETWEEN YOU AND WHAT YOU LOVE

WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE

Frank Bidart
https://awp.diaart.org/poetry/87_88/bidart3.html

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