After a day sitting on a chair, staring at a screen and pondering over lectures and their content, I feel the urge to find comfort. I position a decorative pillow upright in one corner of my bed and snuggle up to it. Legs extended, wrapped in a blanket, and laptop on hand I may have just found my most favourite spot to rest and ponder, to write and listen.
And watch.
I turn off the brighter of my two lamps. Now only a small LED-powered table lamp on its lowest setting scarcely illuminates the room. Funnily enough that lamp used to be graced by a lovely lampshade, but it was damaged in an accident whose exact course I seem to have forgotten. It’s replacement is laughably tiny, but for a small lamp typically on the lowest setting, it fits quite nicely. Regardless, the whole purpose for that lamp is to provide some comfort for my eyes. More importantly, it shall not disrupt the marvellous view out the balcony door by some dazzling reflections on the glass.
The view I now have, tucked in a blanket, the heated aluminium laptop body warming by legs, is focused directly onto the chateau-style rehab clinic up the mountains. Rather parts of it, for that used to be a lung clinic still is a vast building complex. It seems that everytime I hike into the mountains and pass by it, I find another small annex hidden behind the trees and bushes, revealing just how massive this institute really is.
With it throning over my hometown I caught many spectacular vistas of it, and in the most surprising places. Such as from this very corner of my bed.
What strikes me is the precise subset I can see. There leads but one street up the mountains towards the institute. Along it are several lamps, illuminating the street in that distinctive amber hue. A singular streetlamp shines all the way through the leafless trees into my bedroom.
The clinic is now home to people with disabilities and thus requires many helping hands of care assistants. They drive along that road many times a day, and during night I see their headlights flashing up as they drive and turn up and down the institute.
I often sit here, in this very corner of my bed, hands on the keyboard, music on my ears, and gaze out the window into the mountains. And I wonder if I were to enjoy this view that much if this was not my hometown.