I've lived in many houses.

I have a hard time thinking about things ending.

When the spring comes, we begin booking flight tickets. The clothes go in cases, more often in boxes; the papers go in boxes, more often in trash bags. We file and label and lose things. Inevitably, as the life of the year spins out from trapped corners. as the house is taken apart, I break my glasses.

I've lived in many, many homes throughout my life. The first time I lived close to someone I was also emotionally close to was residential college. I can't go back to campus without the air around me seeming to shimmer. It's too rich, it was always too rich. I broken down crying in front of a professor in that office off the arterial hallway of the research-lab building. Two doors over, I was learning how to construct a second-order logic sentence while trying not to stare at the hooked bridge of the node of the person explaining it to me in particular while I held up the rest of the room by not knowing this already. A door down from that, I was explaining a single cramped page of proofs to a professor who shared my mother's maiden name. One floor up, a semester of three-hour discourses with another professor who was trying very very hard to save my life with philosophy, who seemed to be to be watercolored directly onto the air. Cramped airless rooms full of friends in the late night. Plausibly lesbian anime theme song ringtones heard in the stairwell, several stories away. Midnights gathered around the juice canteen, learning to disinvest in the people around me, to dismiss their personhood as I learned to treat people and conversations as less precious than I was heretofore used to. A room whose corners i touched often; three pieces of furniture I learned inside out. I loved and loved and loved. I learned the light of the early mornings and the breeze in the streets when classes were in session and I was too late to be allowed in. I learned ants and bugs' eggs. I learned to walk kilometers for good conversations. I learned to recognize someone out of the corner of my eye by the ways they moved, and to welcome it, and to dread it.

I've never known anyone, before or since, as well as I knew every one of my neighbours in college.

I can't go back and I don't want to. But I lost something when I left and it makes me want to scream to think of it too long.

When the spring comes, we book our tickets. In the winter, we try to go away for a little while, and these days we succeed at it. I am we, because I was we for too long and I hurt more acutely when i am just I.

When I stopped talking to my father I lost something. The cauterization was well done and it didn't hurt, but something did; a phantom pain past where I didn't have him anymore. Years later, I had a dream where we had to get me to the airport. The road went through an underwater tunnel, and as the car filled up he kept saying. without looking at me, "don't worry; we'll get there in time."

This is who he is. This is who we are. I don't want to leave anymore. I don't want to stay here but I don't like leaving anymore.

One day, I hope, I become migratory. I have many homes. I love many people and I visit them in the summer, in the winter; I get away and I go towards, I leave and I return. One day again, I hope, I have a routine, and a favorite place to buy coffee, and a quality of sunlight through a particular window that I hold dear. I wish for these things. I wish to be able to build them.

It's like growing my hair, I suppose; I have so much of it, and when I let it grow out it gets so heavy. That's how I always feel in October and November – the all-at-once shock of weight as the curve its fall shifts downward, the headache and heat. I stylist once told me that – she had a particular way of rifling through it, like she was flipping pages – "wow, you just have so much hair here" – and I was proud but also groaning, because that sure did explain the headaches I get when it grows out too long. The connotations and implications of its length haven't yet eased, but what willl stay with me is the physicality, the sheer weight – that surely, as I age, I will miss, like I miss the curve of my own back as it was before the time and the stillness. I suppose I'm learning to think about things ending.