'i did not realize until later that these were the days of significance, days of ardent love and days of satisfaction.'

-- anchee min, red azalea

scattered:

it was cold in the new house last night-- deathly cold, it seemed, relatively, to one like me still running on a slow thaw despite all of my spring-mindedness. a return to winter is not welcome, and it didn't help that i've been reading a book set on a day in february. i finished it as quickly as possible as soon as i awoke this morning. the cold carried over into today even though it was warmer outside, lingering in the still-new air of the place. i'm still getting used to it. i went for a walk, trying to place myself in this place as a resident rather than a visitor, and it finally clicked when i made it back to the door and turned off the sidewalk and up the front steps, as if to say 'i live here.'

all i can think of is this notion of young people in houses, like the night of greg's party or last summer at dan's; the vague arrangements and routines we remember from the domesticity of youth shine on a surface of conventionality that laminates the entire experience. we're becoming our parents. i don't know if i'll ever tap into the current of this neighbourhood-- perhaps soon when i have a car and need to negotiate parking in snap decisions on either side of the street in front of various houses. the houses get nicer as you advance down in the opposite direction. i walked that way earlier today. i have to get used to not having people around all the time-- i don't live on campus anymore. imagine that. never will again. there won't be people just next door or down the hall or distractions of the same magnitude. obvious realities still sinking in.

laura was here for the first two nights and i can feel her absence so acutely in every part of the house because she was there at the beginning. she'll be back next weekend but this will be the longest we've gone without each other in two months-- she was always reassuringly next door. she left me a note which she hid under my pillow so i'd find it later and she left wearing my sweatshirt in the increasing cold of sunday's late afternoon, which grew into the cold night whose tinny frigid aftershocks still lurk in the air between these pieces of secondhand furniture and new blinds. maybe making seamless connections will make the time seem to go by more quickly.