I did this

Hello blank sheet my old friend. How can I write you today?

Just to be clear, this is definitely not a weather report but it’s such a lovely day out there. I can hear it. The leaves are tumbling around on their spiny feet and the air sounds blue and golden red. You go, fall day!

I’m in bed right now, too sick to go to work or even make my root canal treatment and feeling too guilty about both of these things to truly rest. Yesterday I took Lemsip tablets with paracetemol until it felt like the blood vessels around my heart were short-circuiting. So today I’m taking the drug-free approach to wellbeing: plenty of liquids (coffee), vitamins (vitamin Haribo) and rest (hello internet). Why do I feel no better?

Actually, I did fall asleep there for a little while but then became much too aware of the growing puddle of drool beneath my cheek (tmi?) and had to wake up before I was ready.

And now.

?

I was thinking (shhh) about how much I like everything these days – the city, the strangers, the friends, the flat, the outings, the food, even work – and that maybe this all-around sense of okayness has made a bit of room for me to miss home finally.

There’s nothing in particular I miss. It seems to come from a place of nostalgia, which in my case means looking distantly at past landscapes from a future perspective I haven’t yet reached with something like respect. Does this make sense?

I have a clear recollection of how a certain street corner would look at four p.m. in September, for instance, or the backside of a brick apartment complex on a summer afternoon.

My parents’ house: comforting and menacing, the edges rotting towards the centre where you pace in saccharine light, pick up weightless memorabilia, meaningless archives. The rooms tense - even when they weren’t home, even when nobody was home. Even now. (I feel a bit sorry for its new owners, whoever they are.)

Home. It’s not that you can never go back – it’s that it never existed in the first damn place.

This seems okay to me. Like maybe things don’t have to be resolved chronologically. Maybe getting better happens all over the map, in bright blossoms, or like when those white solitaire cards bounce around your screen, randomly and eventually erasing all traces of green.

Those cards never covered up the whole screen, actually. That really annoyed me for some reason.