Space Bar

Last year thespacebar onmy keyboard startedsticking.

Yes, just like that.

It was the strangest feeling, to be typing away and then suddenly realize something so essential was missing — something I’d never given much thought to before. The solid space bar, five times as long as the average key, always right under my thumb, failed me.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

I had to pry apart my words one by one, pressing with intention, running my nail under the edge to try and scrape loose some impossibly powerful speck of dust or food.

It was probably food. I was eating in front of my keyboard a lot, for lack of a better place to eat. My dining table was my desk, my living room my office, and my office my bedroom. My life was compressed into this small studio, everything stuck together indefinitely. Maybe there just wasn’t enough space left to go between my words.

The funny thing that happens, when your own space shrinks, is that the spaces between you and other people expand. They grow far beyond the requisite two meters. The several thousand miles between me and my family seemed to multiply each day; the tenuous friendships I’d built in a new city stretched and quivered and threatened to snap.

Everyone says our perception of time has altered. A month seems like a year and weeks slip by unnoticed. But while we all obsessed over incubation periods and lockdown timelines, our spaces were fusing together and breaking apart.

I sliced up my own space to correspond with my habits: I’ll eat breakfast here, do yoga there, never retreat to the bed until it’s dark out. I spaced out my grocery trips and Googled how far I was allowed to walk. I spaced out, period.

I rewatched Space Jam for some sense of familiarity. I found cockroaches crawling out of unsealed spaces in the walls of my ancient apartment. I downloaded an app that was supposed to help expand the space in my head.

The mutiny of my keyboard ran parallel to a shortage of space around and inside me. I didn’t have the emotional space for [insert hardship here]. I wanted to roll my eyes and tell the world to give me some space, slam a teenage bedroom door on the suffering and fear that was leaking through my walls with the cockroaches.

Photo by Brina Blum on Unsplash

Several months after my space bar stopped sticking, I started sharing my space with somebody else. We erased the meters and then centimeters. I allowed myself to be touched and breathed on with wild abandon, absorbing another person into my carefully limited existence.

We shared a spoon and sipped from the same beer. I let myself be close to someone without worrying if it was too close, knowing it was worth the risk.

It made me realize how much I missed taking space for granted. I used to believe that I could get as close to anyone as I wanted to be, go anywhere at any moment, and worry only about running out of time. I used to type freely, thoughtlessly, without forcefully stabbing the largest key.

You don’t know what you’ve got until your space bar starts sticking.

But once it stops, it’s so easy to forget. Muscle memory kicks in, and even though you know it might happen again at any moment, you go back to focusing on the words themselves, instead of what’s between them.

We type our stories and live them out. We settle into old habits and into new arms. We reclaim the spaces we thought we had lost. And we try not to eat in front of our keyboards too much.

This article was originally published on Medium. You can view the original post here.