Sanctuary

July here,

We keep ruminating on something, mostly because we'd like to capture it in some way. In fiction, I suppose. I'll write about it a little here, though.

The starting point of these thoughts are this: we really love hotel rooms. We don't use them much, but we just find them very cozy. Even as a kid, we felt this way. Travelling and being away from home has always been stressful to creatures of habit like us, and so having a kind of home base that we could return to was rejuvenating. Comfortable. Sometimes we'd get left there in the evening while our parents went to do something else and we could just play games or whatever, the same kind of thing we'd do back home, but it felt special.

It's not just in real life either, funny enough. During our time with Final Fantasy 14, we spent kind of a good amount of time in the in-game hotel room instances doing our crafting and such. That is, until we got access to some ingame housing and made that into our dedicated alone time spot. We just never liked being observed when messing around with the crafting mechanics, and there were a number of utilities there, for getting some common items or for playing music. It's not really about the hotel in this case. We have distinct memories of the observation tower in LEGO Island being a spot we could spend like an hour or something, hitting the radio button over and over and listening to the soundtrack. There are some other examples of this kind of thing I could list, but music comes up often in them.

So, we've been thinking about what defines this state of comfort. It's not how we feel at home, but rather something a little special. The home away from home kind of feeling. The word we've wanted to use is sanctuary. That leads naturally to the first thing: that these places kind of exist in the context of greater levels of stress. We get irritated when away from home, and so we enjoy being able to get away from that. This is the second point: solitude. These places feel isolated enough that there's no danger of being watched or judged. Thirdly: self-sufficiency. These places have most or all of the things we want and need so that we can stay for a good long while without having to leave. Fourthly: Control. We have the ability to make things as we want in a sanctuary. You could mess up a hotel room if you were really rowdy, but for the most part we can just exist within our personal desires there. Fifthly: no associated responsibility. We don't have to do the bulk of cleaning up the hotel room later. Or in virtual spaces, there's no clean up needed. That's what makes the sanctuary distinct from our home, which is our own space, but one that we feel an obvious responsibility to maintain.

That much brought us to an inevitable conclusion: Sanctuary is temporary. It's a luxury. It's a state of being more than a place, really. In the case of a hotel, it exists because of someone else's work (putting aside property rights since that's a whole thing). There's a sense of hedonism to it. That's fine, of course. We aren't rejecting the feelings, but rather accepting the limitations of comfort and safety. Life never really stops, but in the case of extraordinary circumstances, we appreciate that kind of extraordinary relaxation. Of course, we're exceptionally testy and need a lot of alone time. Alone with each other at least. It's not just Mira who has cat behavior, you know?