that's a dog browsing a department store, completely unsupervised

If you move often the thing you miss the most is the way it feels to live somewhere for a year. After a year you don't have bruises from running into doorways and furniture in your apartment (I'm really clumsy) and you could almost do everything with your eyes closed because your hand has memorized the exact height of your shelf and the snooze button on your alarm clock and how the fridge opens.

The fridge at my new apartment opens on the opposite side you'd think it would, and every time I try and open it I spend a quarter of a second thinking "What the heck is wrong with this thing. How am I supposed to get the milk out of it? This isn't right, this isn't my fridge, this isn't my home."

Right now my home is Marseille. The things I miss most about Marseille lately is the width of the sidewalk and the amount of sunlight and the whiteness of the buildings and redness of the rooftops. It took me a year to memorize how far from the curb to walk and how much to squint, and the peach-tint of every day, iced with a layer of Marseille-blue sky. I miss knowing the exact price of my staple foods at the grocery store. I miss the shade of orange my curtains were. I miss knowing where to hold my breath because it smelled bad. Three steps past the antique book store smells like dead rats. Twelve steps past the macaron shop smells like urine. These are constants. These things never change. Unless you move to the other side of the world.



Maybe in a few months Los Angeles will be home, but right now it isn't, and even though I love my family, neither is Minnesota. Right now I'm a confused girl wandering lost around a grocery store full of strangely-priced food, wondering if she's going to be homesick for the rest of her life.