I have to drive six hours to PA tonight. Alone. I can’t even begin to tell you how sad that makes me. I used to take this drive alone all the time. Still do. I just know the feelings and when they’re going to come that I start to dread them.

The leaving is hard, of course. Saying goodbye to TIRH and the cats. Once I get going on the road I feel good. If I get into traffic, I start to wish I’d waited a little bit so I didn’t have to be waiting in traffic. I feel sad that I’m losing time. Then when I get going again, I feel good that I left when I did because it means more time with the family.

I get home. Everyone’s happy to see me and they show it in their own little way. I catch up. Hear stories. Tell stories. Tone down my politics. I’m happy. These people look like me. They know me. I know them.

I go to sleep in a strange yet familiar bed.

I wake up. It’s late morning. Very late. I’ve gotten the best sleep in months. I feel great. I feel awful, because what little time I have left to see everyone has been eaten up by sleep.

I go to other familiar houses and see other people. They make me happy. I see younger people who are growing up without me there. They look handsome. They look beautiful. I am sad because I don’t call/write these people. They are me, after all.

I see that people are sad and have had a rough time of it. I wish I had been there to help them through the hard times. I feel guilty because I’m not there to do that. I know that sometimes I can be good at that: helping people through things. It’s because I shut up and listen. When people are going through shit, they want someone who will shut up and listen. That’s me.

I go out to dinner with people. We talk and laugh and eat good food. We go home. We relax. We watch a movie or we go to a movie. I hardly see movies anymore. I feel happy that I’m doing something I rarely do.

I look through my old things and contemplate bringing them home with me to my other home. The home I’ve chosen. I try to figure out why I’ve chosen that home.

I spend a few more days doing this and then on the last day, it’s late afternoon and I have to drive back to the other home. That home starts to seem like a strangeland. But the people I think about when I think about that strangeland are not strangers. They are a part of me.

The lump in my throat grows and I am sad because I have to drive six hours to get somewhere that I’m not sure I even want to be.

I drive. The drive gets easier. By the time I make it half way through, I change. I am thinking less about my origin and more about my destination. I want to be home with my cats and my TIRH and my friends. I push the other people out of my mind.

I get home. I hug TIRH. I pick up my cats and hug them. I fall asleep in a bed that seems strange yet familiar and I think about my homes and how there’s too much distance between them and I also think about how I know I’m soon going to forget that I feel this dissonance and life will go on. It always does.