area: no measure of depth

When I was 15, I was obsessed with — surprise! — Emily Dickinson. If you're a teenaged girl, I think it's required that you go through a phase of either Emily or Sylvia Plath. My Plath phase didn't come till I was 18 (man, and I was a total downer then). Anyway, I read all her anthologies, all the biographies. As she described herself: "I am small, like the wren, and my hair is bold, like the chestnut bur, and my eyes like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves." How could I not love that? I used to grow heliotropes in my garden, because I once read that she requested she be buried with a handful of heliotropes "to bring to my (...)." George? Shit, I forget his name. Some guy she supposedly loved who died before her. In fact, this summer I had some heliotropes in a pot on the porch until my mom let them die when I was out of town a few weekends ago (for a woman who saves people's lives, she's a horribly unskilled gardener).

Anyway, I thought of Emily Dickinson the other day. The first time I've really thought of her in nine years. I thought of her because I've been mulling over the idea of location. I've been here since February, and soon I'll be back in Boulder. And I want to go to school in Seattle. San Francisco. New York. Austin. Chicago. Portland. Prague. Santa Fe. Oxford. Middlebury. I don't know. Sometimes I miss living in Paris so badly that it feels like I have a big, baguette-shaped piece missing from my life. I want to move to Brazil. Actually, I want to move to New Zealand. Or both. Maybe Russia.

I was at my desk looking up how to obtain a work visa to live in Reykjavik, and I found a quote: "A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." How appropriate, I thought to myself. How fitting. (I later looked up this quote on Wikiquote and learned that "this quote has gained popularity among Facebook users as of April 2008." Blurg). 

And then suddenly, I thought of Emily Dickinson, who never travelled more than 60 miles from her hometown. Okay, I don't remember how many miles exactly. But not very far. And I suddenly felt so suffocated at my desk, and so, so sorry for Emily Dickinson. And, you know, I did the normal freak out: I calculated how much money it would cost me to live in Paris again, looked up plane tickets, searched hostels, browsed ebay for kickin' old luggage. 

But then I remembered another quote I once read. After Emily died, her sister, Lavinia, found the 1,800 poems that Emily never had published. And on a scrap piece of paper, she found something that Emily had scrawled out hastily:

"Area: no measure of depth."

And I felt like an asshole for feeling sorry for her, and for feeling sorry for myself.