Since I Found the Cat

my life has changed immensely.  

     The biggest shift is definitely in what I consider home.  I am a nomad.  Since I left for college seven years ago, I have moved twenty-eight times.  Twenty-eight.  And that’s starting the tally after I stayed in seventeen different places in the span of a month.  I travel.  I move somewhere, start over, nest a little and then leave.  I have friends all over the world, but none of whom I consistently see.  I’ll see them again, but the when is a mystery and one that I have learned to love.  Of course there are times when I long for consistency or to see those that I miss, but “home” has never been part of my vocabulary.  It’s been a place-holder word, a concept with a lowered opacity, a sounds that stings when I realize how different its meaning is for me compared to those with families.  So I move.

     The reasons for it vary, at first I thought I was heading towards a specific city, but once the cabin fever set in, I realized this is just who I am.

     And then I found Eurydice.  I’ve never been more excited to go back to my apartment.  I’ve always favored sleepovers; even the weekend I found her, I stayed at three different friends’ homes.  And yet two months later, and I think I’ve only stayed at two different places.  It used to be when I spent time with friends, I’d crash at their places rather than playing subway roulette to get home.  I never had a reason to.  Now, I rush home.  I change plans depending on when I can go back to her.  Even if I know she’ll be okay, my maternal instincts kick in and I rush back to make sure she’s happy and fed.
     I’ve moved plants and created a Spencer’s Tank Obstacle Course (so she doesn’t get too curious about the crab), and I have a solid thousand photos of her on my phone.  When friends ask how I am, I answer with stories about her.  That geographical directionless that I felt before, the feeling that I living out of my backpack as I pinballed from home to home …it’s fading.  I feel consistency.  Settling in.  And when I first found her, the idea of saying that S word sent me into many an existential crisis, but now that I’ve had her, seen her every day for two months, I’m happy in realizing that I may have found “home” when I found her.