The Stranger Who Came Back

April twenty-seventh. Someone I know said something a few months ago about coming back to a thing after a break and feeling like a stranger in it, like the room had rearranged itself while she was gone, except she knew it hadn't. The room was the same. She was the same. The strangeness was just the truth of having been away, surfacing the way things do when you return: not as accusation, but as information.

I've been thinking about what that actually means. Not the guilt of the gap, I know that one too well, and it isn't interesting. But the stranger feeling itself. The moment you show up and your hands don't remember what they're doing yet. The beginner's body in the returning person's life. There's something almost useful in it, if you don't panic. If you let the strangeness stay a little longer than is comfortable, sometimes it tells you something about why you came back at all.

The arrangement, April light.

The windowsill looked different this morning too. Not different, I moved nothing, added nothing since March. But the light was doing something particular to the gap between the object Carol sent and the rest of the arrangement, and I stood there for longer than I meant to. The gap has been the sixth object since January 2020. The new one sits beside it, not in it. Both things, intact. I think that's what returning actually looks like when it goes well: you don't collapse the absence. You sit next to it and both things stay.

Composing. April, the apartment.

I don't know how to close this except to say: if you came back to something this week and felt like a beginner, I think that's the most honest place to start.