Home

I'm sitting on the hardwood floor in my new bedroom. It's small--too small for the amount of stuff I've accumulated in the years I have been living on my own. I'm mostly unpacked. There are some things still in boxes that I have finally decided I can live without--things that he pushed hard for me to get rid of before we moved here, things that I fought hard to keep. Ironic that now that he's gone, I am willing to part with them, at least they will only be at my mother's house, waiting for me to collect them when I am ready.

He...he will be back in Atlanta. My home. The South, where I spent the better part of my adolescence planning my escape; Georgia, where I came of age during the cool humidity of a summer's night; Atlanta, where, at age 20, I finally felt at home for the first time in my life. Yet, it is the one place I feel I can't consider.

So, here I am...not wanting to stay, unable to leave. Fleeting thoughts of rainy Seattle cloud my mind (it's as far away as I can get without leaving the continental US). But instead I find myself in the northernmost neighborhood of Brooklyn, sitting on the tiny sliver of floor that separates my bed from my dresser from my bookshelf. I realize this place will never feel like home. It will always occupy that transitory space that is post-him and pre-who-knows. And I know all I can do is wait for that moment when I find somewhere that I can again call "home".