I walk into my bedroom and it smells different. It smells like a hotel room. The scent is familiar and intimate but also foreign and strange. Everything looks exactly the same but somehow changed. As if I've wandered onto a stage set of my bedroom. But no, all four walls remain. The ceiling is real, not intimated. And all at once it hits me like a blow. This isn't home. And I don't know when I'll have any such thing, not really.

I have a place where I sleep. A place where I can store my clothes and food and plug in this computer. But none of it is mine in that way that I need it to be mine.

And another thing. After years without a reliable friend, having one makes me sad sometimes. I can't explain it. It's wonderful to be the person that someone immediately calls when the good {or, more recently, the bad, and more truthfully, the awful} things happen. It's reassuring to have a number I can dial and just start talking without any explanation, even if it's just to voicemail. I can say "So I'm watching this show tonight and this woman is supposed to be incredibly, disgustingly rich and she's showing off the rooms she just decorated - no, had decorated - and I'm just appalled that the set decorator even got away with this because this woman who's supposed to have house shopped by reading Architectural Digest has her children's bedrooms made to look like they just finished the shoot for the IKEA kid's catalogue," and then hang up knowing she will just get it. Or, she calls me and says "I'm driving the two hours home and I'm so tired that I'm watching the people in the car ahead of me at this stoplight and this guy is waving something in the woman's face and he keeps pushing it in her face and I'm thinking it's a gun and 'oh my god, I don't want to have to call the police and deal with all that right now' but then, no, it's a microphone but why they hell is he pushing a microphone in her face while he should be driving even though technically they're at a stoplight right now when I realize it's a slimjim and he's just a dork. Yeah. Call me." And it's so reasonable a monologue to get on my voicemail from her that later when she asks if I got that message I don't even remember it. But it's sad, like I said, but I still can't explain why. And we've been friends for years {since high school, she says, though I don't remember even knowing her in high school and trust me it wasn't because I was so friggin' popular} and it only just became like this.

Maybe it's sad because it's never who you think it will be. Or because it makes me quit trying with someone else because I can't be the only one who's all in, if that makes any sense.

I don't know. It's just great but also a kind of dull, aching sad in some really strange way.

And there is so much up in the air right now and so many things boiling over on back burners and all these crazy thoughts in my head but I can't ever talk about the things during but only after. It's a thing with me, I guess. But rarely does anyone know what's going on with me until after it's gone. It's not what you think. Well, probably it isn't. I mean, how do I know what you think? I mean, I'm talking to myself here, so maybe it is what you/I think. Again, I don't know.

But I'm tired of this feeling that so much is so goddamn impermanent. And I'm tired of being so all encompassingly lonely. I'm only living on the fringes of my life because there is some sort of pit full of quicksand in the middle and I'm scared of how deep it might go. And sometimes I'm pretty sure I'm going crazy or perhaps have even already gone. And someone at work asked me "Are you trying to get pregnant?" and for the life of me I had no idea what to say. I mean, it's a million miles from true or even possible at this point, but there was a definite second there when I just had no idea what the answer was. And I went illiterate the other day. Not the kind where you read "photography" as "foe-toe-gra-fee" but the kind where you look at words and think they are in another language entirely. But then they aren't. They're perfectly common English words and you {meaning I} just suddenly don't know them anymore. So maybe I'm just crazy. Or depressed. Or both. How else do you explain it all? I wish I could pull this stuff out of my brain and iron it all out so I could see the whole picture and somehow say "Ah ha!" and suddenly have the answer. Or an answer. Or even just a tiny clue that was a sliver of a hint of an answer. Because I thought that by this point you {meaning I} should have a much better idea of what the hell was going on. Or where the hell I was going. But I can't even be cohesive enough to write a single fucking entry much less work out some life plan for myself or anything more complicated than choosing a dipping sauce for my chicken strips. Because really, even that is too much for me.