Last month I filled my car a bit past the point of what was safe and drove out of Montana, doubling back on a trip I made 6 and a half years ago. When I drove to Montana in November of 2014, I came with only what I could fit in my car; my furniture followed two months later. This time movers took my stuff away about a week before I followed, letting me end my journey as I started: sleeping on an air mattress in an empty northside apartment.

Except I didn’t really follow my stuff because my stuff went first to a warehouse somewhere, and then I sat in Missouri waiting for it. This time, though, I have been in a house full of familiar things. I have moved back into my parents’ house, at least for a few months, until I decide what’s next.

I have come back here between every major transition since I graduated high school and at this point it’s as much a sort of transit station for my adult life as it is the home of my high school years. It always feels temporary in spite of the fact that it has been the most enduring residence of my 33 years on this earth. My permanent temporary address.

Each time I have landed back in this house I have found myself trying to process and heal from something. (Often — much like right now — something that’s not really over.) And because I have an actual bedroom full of stuff that I leave behind each time I go, I am surrounded by reminders. There’s a wall of posters from my teenage self and another wall covered in mementos from college, from the year after I graduated, from when I came back after grad school — souvenirs from other times I found myself back in this in-between space. It has been an unexpected source of comfort to be surrounded by my past recoveries as hope and perhaps proof that it will happen again. A reminder of everything that used to seem impossible, made all the more impactful by the perverse power bestowed by choosing to return to a place that I used to feel trapped by.

For the time being my life is, in some sense, as it was before: I have the same full time job and I am doing it from home so I kind of just live in this computer. I have moved from my one small box to a much larger box. But it’s the transition box, a lobby at the entrance to something new. After a year and a half in which each day seemed to reveal a surprise more terrible than the one before, I am trying to remind myself that this is the good kind of suspense, the kind I used to thrive on.

I’m also giving myself the space and time to be soothed by things that are old and familiar. I am appreciating being able to hug my parents, the enormous privilege it is to be able to be here, and the company of a stuffed gorilla named Bobo.

Other things I’m doing:

• nonfiction book club continues! Our next book is The Disordered Cosmos by Chanda Prescot-Weinstein, which we are discussing on Saturday, September 10th at 5 pm ET
• Mari and I are, of course, chatting about the latest MCU show on Friday nights. We’re doing the Loki finale, this Friday at 8pm.
• We also started another fun new project in the spring that is currently waiting for me to finish reading a very long book. This is me acknowledging that I know have to read the very long book. I am so sorry it’s just very long, you see. In the meantime, I promise that first video is pretty good.

The rest of my life these days has nothing linkable! Shocking! My parents and I are finishing a part of the basement that will soon become my little office. I have now learned how to lay tile and while I’m proud of our work, I would just like to say, for the record: never again.

That’s all for now. I suppose a nice ending ought to go here, but as I said, I am in a state of transition, so—