Home?

I'm sitting in my room, with the posters on the walls and too many books to count and more clothes than i remember and all the random items and junk that I have accumulated over the past two decades, unpacking my baggage from the past five months.  The suitcases are the easy part.

It is strange to be back.  Not like I never left.  Little things are different. It has been five months, after all.  But five months does not seem to have been as long here as it has there.  Five months in Germany was a lifetime.

It looks like I did build a life for myself there after all.  It just was not one I thought it would be.

So now I'm a different person than the one who left here in January, but I'm not the one who lives in Germany anymore.  It's like putting on an old pair of shoes after you've broken in a new one.

Once you return from a trip, you throw open all of your suitcases, and there is a big chaotic mess while you try to put everything back in its old place, and find place for the new items you brought back with you.

But I think, at least for a little while, I'm going to leave one of the suitcases closed.  The one whose contents are safely packed away where they can't do any harm.  It will have to opened eventually, of course - I can't be dragging it around for the rest of my life - but not now.  Wait until everything is unpacked and putback in place.  Wait until I know where I am again.  Then I can carefully find a place for the last of my baggage.