our little home in the middle of nowhere

I turned over in bed last night and said, "I miss Chicago."
"You do?" Jeremiah said. "Why?" He didn't sound surprised, just curious. That's my partner, Mr. Curious.
"It just seems like we left so suddenly," I replied. "And life there just keeps on going."

You know that I'm enjoying our stay in Augusta. We spend lots of time with my sister and her precious family. We eat and drink with friends. We go for runs and swims. We sit reading at dusk in the rocking chairs on the broad front porch of the Partridge Inn, where the Army is boarding us for the summer. We've had time to cuddle and tease and engage each other. It's been like a two-month long vacation, especially for me.

But there have been many moments of sadness and anxiety. And it's not really easy to put my finger on what's made it hard. I think it has to do with this sense that there's this whole other world on the coast of Lake Michigan, full of its own dramas and mundanities, that we just exited from. And it's all still playing out while we're here, just as our little lives are still playing out and our friends in Chicago aren't aware of it. When you're one or two people moving here and there, the world you exist in becomes much smaller. You become your own impervious unit, a kernel protected by a hard shell rolling around from place to place.

This is why our little home here at the Partridge Inn in Augusta feels like a world that doesn't really exist. It's transitional in every way, and we're living in a sort of suspension, waiting for what's to come in Annapolis. I've spent hours and hours on Craigslist looking for our home there, which doesn't feel real either because it's been so hard to find. And all the while feeling like the world we were just in a few weeks ago evaporated and is forgotten. Our friends here, while we've loved being with them, will go back to doing what they were doing before we came. All that exists is Jeremiah and me and Bleu the Cat, rolling around with clothes and crackers and toothbrushes falling out of our suitcases in our rush.