Our landlord has been showing new people around all week. It feels good to be able to look everyone in the eye and tell them, smiling, that we love living here. It’s amazing how much this house has come to signify home to me, not in a romantic sense so much but almost in a semantic one, as if the meaning of the word is simply derived from the combination of these letters and no others. When I imagine myself at other points in my life, four months from now or forty years, in my mind I am still pulling the laundry out of the small closet opposite the bathroom door, still turning on the lamp next to the bed (the one that Alec made), still hearing the same china mugs clink together on the same shelf as I put them away.

I love being able to make my way around in the dark in the middle of the night knowing exactly where everything is. I love how rooms become part of the body, the fact that motions to rise from a particular chair or cross a particular carpet are memorized by muscle.

We’ll be here two more months, and then we’ll be gone. I hope it remembers us, too.