Leobard the Recluse

There’s a lot said about “personal” space: a volatile radius of air-armour that expands or contracts according to the mood of a moment, or the intimacy of a lifetime. To breach it can be an incursion or a liberation.

But there’s also something we carry with us that has much to do with the raw materials of our existence: a wider sense of personal space, woven from the air and light of our childhood memories, the chill and mineral tang of winter tap-water, the smell of grass and earth.

And so we colonise our worlds with this sense of place, mediated by self, always gladly postmarked in the hope of an arrival, a new despatch from a perennial elsewhere.