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Many lack the originality to lack originality in their own time, and so they dwell as exiles in ages they never knew.

Girolamo Isolani

There are evenings when I sit with a blank page before me, the stillness of the room pressing in like an old friend who’s overstayed their welcome. My mind drifts—not to the hum of the present, but to corners of time I’ve never walked. I’m not the only one, I suspect. Many of us live as if we’ve misplaced our footing in this age, our hearts tethered to eras we’ve only brushed against in stories or fleeting daydreams. There’s nothing bold in this retreat; it’s a quiet habit we’ve all inherited, a shadow cast by the human soul.

I remember standing once before a weathered artifact in a museum—a chipped clay vessel, its edges softened by centuries. I could almost feel the hands that shaped it, rough and steady, hear the murmur of a life lived in dust and sunlight. For a moment, I envied that unknown maker, their days so far from the restless glow of my own, where screens flicker and the world speaks in a ceaseless rush. Why did I ache for that distant simplicity? Was it the clarity I imagined there, or just a refusal to face the tangle of my own hours? I lingered, a stranger peering through a window that time had long since sealed shut.

This urge to slip away isn’t rare. I saw it not long ago in a young man at a café, his coat cut from another century, his pen scratching ink like a relic of lost elegance. He spoke of old novels as if they were his neighbors, his voice alive with a warmth that faded when I asked about the streets beyond the window. He wasn’t alone; the room brimmed with others like him, each clinging to their own borrowed elsewhere. It’s a flight, perhaps, from the weight of sitting still with ourselves—a refusal to hear the silence beneath the noise. I’ve known that flight too. As a boy, I’d lose myself in tales of armored valor, picturing a life woven with purpose and steel, far grander than the quiet afternoons I spent pushing a mower through damp grass. What was I running from? The plainness of it all, maybe—the smallness of a life that asked nothing heroic of me.

To live this way, always reaching beyond our own skin, feels like a betrayal of something essential. We’re here, aren’t we?—tossed into this moment with its clatter and its fleeting light. To turn from it, to dress ourselves in the costumes of another age, is to dodge a call we can’t quite name. And yet, how sweet that dodge can be! I recall a night, fuzzy with wine, when I paced my cramped rooms reciting half-remembered lines, pretending I was a scholar in some grand estate, my walls heavy with wisdom instead of chipped paint. The foolishness of it hit me later: there I was, a modern jester, staging a life that never belonged to me, while the city outside pulsed on, heedless of my play.

The truest moments, though, come when I stumble into the now. I tried it once, sitting in a park as a child darted after a pigeon, her laughter slicing through the drone of engines. For an instant, I was rooted—not adrift in some imagined court or shadowed abyss, but here, watching the world unfold. It wasn’t grand, but it was mine. Still, the pull lingers. We’re not alone in this, nor particularly daring. The café dreamer, the boy with his knights, the museum lingerer—we’re all humming the same tune, too timid to silence it. We lack the nerve to lack nerve, to stand bare in our own time and say, “This is enough.” Instead, we wrap ourselves in the threads of what’s gone or what might be, chasing a self that feels less frail.

And yet, what if that’s the thread that binds us?—this restless yearning for a home we’ve never known, while the one we have whispers beneath our steps. I think of that child in the park again, her chase absurd and perfect, and wonder if she’ll grow to flee her days as I have mine. Maybe she’ll sit one night, pen in hand, and feel the same tug toward an elsewhere she can’t touch. Or maybe she’ll stay, her laughter echoing into a future I’ll never see.

For now, I sit here, the page no longer empty but alive with the weight of this hour. Beyond my window, the world spins—chaotic, loud, mine. I could slip away again, lose myself in that potter’s dust or a scholar’s tower. But tonight, I’ll linger. The air is soft, the ink moves, and for once, that’s all I need.