dream job/life

I am building a future workspace in my mind: a small room with hardwood floors, on whose off-white walls are frantically pinned items of inspiration - a few torn-out pages of Dostoevsky over here, some Salinger over there... would it be sacrilegious to tear pages out of the Bible and pin them on a wall? Hmm. Perhaps some of my favorite poems transcribed harshly, directly on the walls themselves with black sharpie. Dali's Girl with Curls, maybe some Van Gogh. Photographs of people I love.

There will be a small table and chair in the center of the room, littered with empty cups, napkins, or receipts, or other small pieces of paper inked with nonsense, a Macbook (or whatever they might call it in the years to come), and a small, very low-light lamp, maybe with a black shade.

Perhaps one wall will be reserved for a projection screen on which to view films. Over in the corner will be a wooden crate holding some of the films that mean the most to me, easily at hand to watch that one scene that causes something to rise in the spirit or sink in the heart.

One big window, thin, stretching nearly the entire height of the wall, broken into panels by wood covered in cracked paint. It would be several stories above the ground and look out over Central Park, and would open outward, hinges on each side and a latch in the center. There would always be a breeze, cool, occasionally freezing, but mostly refreshing. At night the window would creak and softly bang with the brief gusts of wind.

There would be no other furniture in the room except the table and chair in the center so that there would be plenty of room for pacing around, feeling the hardwood on bare feet. The chair wouldn't be a comfortable one, because the room is not designed for lounging, but for working, and the pacing around will be working, and the looking at the photographs on the wall of people I love will be working, and the staring out the window for hours at night will be working.

But my favorite part of the room is the photograph framed on the desk, and the fact that its subject is not far away, proving to be the greatest inspiration. Perhaps she's staring out the window of the room she has built for the very same purpose, just down the hall.

And when we're both done working maybe I'll cook some dinner. And we'll watch an old movie on our big, soft couch, our fingers glad to be done tapping away at keyboards; resting, intertwined, spelling out a word that can never be captured in four small letters.