Having visitors is a great way to eat time. A week has passed with Jenavieve in town. A delightful, painless, laughter filled week. It was almost enough to make me feel like I wasn’t out here on a tightrope all alone. I suppose that’s what sisters are for. In the great fashion of which we were raised we spent most of the week cuddled up in my apartment watching Law and Order and editing photos. Time and distance change nothing. I’ll be home again with my family before I know it, but in the mean time, I am here. My life here has become normal to me, normal in a way that a strange growth or a missing appendage becomes normal. Days of exposure to the same elements smooth the edges of strangeness into something resembling a new life. Having someone here though, looking in, magnified the oddities of how I became this new version of myself. It is a particular and peculiar time in my life, that I can see already being remembered by these crystalline moments, of drinks alone and all night writing sessions, of riding my bike home in the cold on empty streets, and falling asleep with the kitchen lights on. So, for now I’m alone again, and that’s just the way it is.