Back at the Door

May eighth.

Someone said something to me a few months ago, I wasn't going to write about it, and then I kept almost writing about it, and here we are. They said they went back to something after a break and felt like a stranger in a room they'd been in dozens of times before. The specific word they used was stranger. Not rusty. Not out of practice. Stranger, which is a different thing entirely, it's not about skill, it's about belonging, and whether the place still recognizes you when you walk in.

I've been sitting with that because I know the feeling. I've felt it at the wheel. I've felt it in the kitchen when I haven't cooked anything real in two weeks. I've felt it, honestly, with this blog, there are months when I open a draft and the whole voice feels like someone else's handwriting. What I've learned, or what I keep relearning, is that the stranger feeling isn't a verdict. It's just what the beginning of returning feels like. You're not locked out. The room is just taking a second to remember you.

the windowsill, May 2022, the arrangement that was almost finished and then wasn't

The windowsill looks the same this morning as it did in March. The letterpress card, the photographs, the object from Carol's box sitting slightly apart from the rest of them. Gerald's vine has reached another inch past the edge of the shelf. The bowl is still on the shelf above the stove where I moved it in 2017. Nothing has changed and I've still walked past it a hundred times without really looking, and this morning I stood at the counter and looked at it for a while. I don't think I had a thought. I think I was just reminding myself I live here. That the room still has my name on it.

looking at the sill without touching it, a specific kind of morning

You come back. That's the thing. The stranger feeling passes, not because you've practiced your way out of it, but because you stayed long enough to stop being a stranger. That's it. That's actually the whole thing.