The first night back from vacation, I slept the weird kind of sleep I sometimes do, where I’m not fully dreaming, but have a very clear sense that I’m somewhere else. I woke up many times that night, back in the cramped East Village loft bed with insistent cats, but it was to a feeling of being content and cozy, curled up in a nook in a little cabin somewhere on the coast of Maine—a calm that seemed to come from nowhere, but can probably be traced back to a residual sense that I was still close to water and craggy rocks. This despite coming to terms—while in both Portland and sleepy little coastal towns—with the fact that as much as I love Maine in all of its Maine-y-ness, it’s hard to imagine actually following through on my hypothetical lust for living there, and that I’m sort of okay with that. Maybe my displaced dream state had something to do with having just torn through Meghan Daum’s amazing memoir of love and real estate, Life Would Be Perfect if I Lived in That House, which was making me think about living spaces—urban, rural, real, imagined, idealized, falling apart—even more than usual.

Getting back to the city, as usual after returning from some time away, felt disconcertingly simple, things unchanged in a way that’s both reassuring and infuriating. The second night back we were woken up at 6am by a group of people who’d decided it was a good time to drink beer and smoke and laugh on the small patch of roof at the bottom of the air shaft right next to the bed, two short floors down. Their voices and bottle-clinking were amplified by what’s essentially an echo chamber, the disorienting sounds rising up right next to us in a way that felt unnervingly intimate, a low buzz of voices sneaking in through the cracked and therefore permanently curtained window, along with the stink of early morning smoke. That it was a Tuesday did not bode well.

Last night—night #3—was better, which maybe means I’m actually home.