It was a small but important act.
I had realized over the previous week just how adrift I have been feeling of late.
I've been working furiously to get things done, to make this space for myself happen, but I hadn't realized just how much the lack of a Home was wearing on me.
After my wife and I decided we were separating, after I moved onto the couch. It felt like I was a guest in what had, for the last five years, been my home.
Then, after a fight that made me pack my bags and run, I found myself staying at my boyfriends house, without a plan and a little lost.
He'd only just moved in himself.
Nothing was there yet, still on it's way from back east.
For two weeks it was nothing but potential.
I loved being in that big empty space, all of my possessions comfortably inside one tiny room and feeling free of stuff.
I had left with my clothes and my essential cooking equipment.
Almost all I did for those two weeks was enjoy the emptiness of that space and cook.
I got back in touch with the sense of joy I find in preparing food, making something as beautiful as it is delicious and as nourishing as it is transitory.
A meal is so self contained, and yet reflects everything we are.
We must eat to live, and because of this I think we can see ourselves in how we choose to go about food.
It is an obligation we must fulfill to our material being.
It runs all the way from sacrament to chore, from comfort to abuse, and from love to hate.
As we start to understand the incredible complexity of our digestive system, it becomes more and more clear that many of the feelings and emotions we experience originate in the bacteria who live along with us.
No wonder we're so emotional about food, food IS emotion.
After my boyfriend's wife arrived with all their possessions, and their house went from empty possibility to being the physical expression of their lives, I knew I couldn't continue living there. Although I did anyway, because in spite of everything I've learned about listening to my intuition in this past year, it was easy to stay there and feel taken care of.
At least for a while.
Until it wasn't.
And then, just as I had arrived there, all of a sudden because it was the only place I knew how to run to at the time, I was leaving.
Grabbing my stuff and getting the hell out, because apparently when I decide to do something, I have to do it immediately.
It was impossible to maintain the illusion of that place being home.
I found a new place in a week, a place of my own (even though I have a roommate and I swore I was going to live o my own).
There's a lot of decorating to do and it's a ton of work, and three weeks into it I'm still not moved in yet, but last night I cooked a meal there, and slept in the bed that is next to my bed because my bed isn't ready yet, and it felt, for the first time like I might be home.
The last few days have been hard.
Really hard.
I have been exhausted for quite a while and I hadn't realized just how much I need my own space to go to recharge.
But last night was better.
Last night I went to the grocery store (Lam's Seafood Market, it's my favorite one in all of seattle and I'm so glad I live near it again) and bought groceries for the first time in three weeks.
Then I went home.
Something about walking in with groceries and all of a sudden I felt like I actually lived there.
I had a friend coming over, and I had groceries, and I had a kitchen and I had a home again.
Apparently that's what home means to me.
Home is the place where I can walk in and cook without having to ask permission.
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