But if they just make inner emigrations, then they'll only have a home when they're at home

I think I may be having a vacation.

I managed my work for the week so that I could leave my work computer at home on Friday and not feel that whatever I was doing in Providence, I should really be working instead. I'm staying in someone else's house, so it's quiet and stocked with books I do not all own, and while I have responsibilities, they consist primarily of feeding, petting, playing with, and non-traumatizingly cleaning up after two independent and affectionate cats. With an evening entirely to myself, I wrote a review I'd wanted out of my head all week. Today I had a lovely time with rushthatspeaks who drove down from Boston in the late aftenoon; we had dinner at Pizza J (our old anniversary first choice Julian's was not open for dinner early enough to work with the timing, but then again Julian's doesn't serve braised short rib and blue cheese pizza or fluffy arancini with goat cheese) and then attended the Lovecraft Arts & Sciences Council's Women in Horror reading. I picked up copies of Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts (2015) and William Sloane's The Rim of Morning (1964). I talked with the people I don't usually see except at these readings. I got to watch an entire circle of people dunking on Heidegger, Rush-That-Speaks included, and then tagging themselves for Samuel R. Delany novels. s.j. bagley gave me one of their paintings, a small canvas, dark and red-blooming, called Phylotype #14. (The small brindled cat keeps trying to investigate the paper bag I put it in. I keep dissuading her.) skygiants linked me to Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird. Tomorrow I have maybe plans to meet one of the people I don't usually see or maybe I'll just hibernate. The internet is logy enough that I can't stream any movies at the moment, but that's a very minor and possibly mistaken complaint.

I'll come home tomorrow or the day after and there will be things to do and my own cats will curl up next to me and I'll share a couch with my husband, but I don't think it's bad for me to be here.

But I still listen to that music every night

I wonder when living in a city by myself will cease to remind me of New Haven. I walked out earlier this evening to pick up dinner from Pizza J (they're not good at packing and their chicken Caesar wrap had such structural failure that I just ate it like an ordinary salad off a plate, but it was tasty, fulfilled my desire for something vegetal as well as proteinaceous, and I did not realize when I ordered it that their house-made coconut-milk ice cream sandwich would nearly infringe the bigger-than-your-head food rule; this is not a complaint) and I kept thinking of the years of curry noodle soups and late-night dumplings I bought from the Ivy Noodle, which seems to have transformed in the last decade into the Ivy Wok; Bulldog Burrito where I acquired any number of adequately excellent quesadillas is now the Tomatillo Taco Joint and if the photos on Google Maps are anything to go by, the whole area has been rather stunningly engulfed by a multiple-block retail district that I don't even know what to say to, except yikes. It was bad enough when I willingly patronized restaurants with university tie-in names without them being some kind of literal Yale mall. On the other hand, grad school was when I began seeing movies in theaters for more than social occasions because for the first time in my life I had disposable income and lived about three blocks from a movie theater, the York Square Cinema of blessed memory. Literally I walked across two streets and there was a marquee. I saw Eitan Gorlin's The Holy Land (2001) there the month I moved in. I saw Billy Ray's Shattered Glass (2003) and Peter Weir's Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) once the semester began. I never did manage to see Wayne Kramer's The Cooler (2003), even though it had a trailer that actually made me want to. I've been trying to remember where I saw Bill Condon's Kinsey (2004), because I associate it with driving to a movie theater in Orange that may not exist anymore; I definitely saw Mary Harron's The Notorious Bettie Page (2005) at the Criterion Cinemas on Temple Street, for which I had to walk about ten minutes in the opposite direction. Ditto Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), which due to Yale's Old Campus standing in for Marshall College during a chase scene remains the only movie of my experience where the scenery got a standing ovation. Others I've forgotten. The Criterion opened in the fall of 2004; the York Square closed in the summer of 2005. I left New Haven in 2006 and Yale permanently in 2008 and I was going to write that I have never again had that combination of money and immediately accessible movie house, except now spatch works at the Somerville, which is almost the same thing. I'll be making plans to see Alex Garland's Annihilation (2018) there as soon as I get back to Boston, especially with the silliness of Paramount refusing to give it a proper theatrical release because Garland wouldn't soften his female protagonist or de-complicate the ending. I didn't have cats when I lived in New Haven. I have one small cat rocketing back and forth through the rooms of this apartment in Providence, observed from the couch by me and from the chaise longue by the other cat. I didn't die just because I don't have that life anymore.