Given in its place.

Something amazing is how people can traverse the same spaces, but on completely separate planes of existence. This is a string of sunny afternoons, and I have been sitting on the porch with coffee, Pascal, and some books. And past my porch on this quiet street, a woman, tweaking, scurried along the sidewalk. She was sobbing into her cellphone and frantically twitching as if some ants were crawling all over her limbs. Separated by some number of feet were panic and peace.

Spaces evaporate for a moment when your eyes meet another's. They melt into the one small place outlined by your faces, the point of your shoes, the occasional movement between a hand and an arm. And you can share in a conversation, where you speak and hear all the very same words as another, but the flow and drift of those words in your place may not be the same as the person with whom you're sharing them. One may be speaking with a nervous admiration while the other listens, deep and warm but tired. Everyone may take the same walk through streets, but through the objects that make up its place they will spot and think of their own losses or hopes, pasts and futures. In everything, and from everything, there is mood and history that are not a part of spaces and words, but which can always arrive out of those things. This is that separation which bears the kinds of loneliness or security that people feel about themselves. To know someone is to feel in the objects around you the ways of meaning that another would impress upon them or derive from them. But, then, to know is only to wonder--whether that one also sees you in those things too, where knowledge and imagination carry each other.