It's 5:50 in the morning. I'm not sure what I'm doing awake, but I woke up, feeling thirsty and disoriented, and somehow, 30 miutes later, I'm still awake. Typing.

One morning, maybe a few weeks ago, I woke up and realized this didn't feel new anymore. It's the same hazy feeling that eventually settled over all of my dorms through college: that this might not be my real home, but it sort of is. I've memorized the cracks in the sidewalk around here, and they're all well-worn paths. It just doesn't quite feel like home yet, which probably owes to the fact that it still feels remarkably dorm-like between the too-small kitchen and trunk-cum-coffee table.

I'm not sure when these living situations start feeling like a home, but then, I'm not even sure what I expect from a "home" these days anyway. I went back to Plymouth for a few days earlier this month and realized my bedroom there no longer felt like home, either.

The foreign feeling is owed in part to the fact that most of the furniture and decorations that occupied it have since been pilfered for other rooms of the house. No desk, no dresser, no cabinets. Boxes of things that don't belong to me but haven't found their proper place in the house dot the floor. There are still piles of things shipped home from college all around, things that didn't make the cut when I moved to New York but aren't ready to be thrown out just yet.

For eight years, I slept night after night in that room, and now I can't sleep there very well. The light comes in too bright in the mornings, a fact I was aware of through high school, but back then, it seemed a part of the room. Now, I find it intolerable.

It feels forced and artifical when I stay there now, and I realize, a big part of this is that I can't remember the last time Liz slept there too.

I guess there aren't many more possibilities of the two of us sharing the room again, even just for a night. But that's really another entry, one I'm not sure I'm ready to write just yet.

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