It is freshly October and our bus rolled in around 10am, this morning. I woke in the top bunk to bright light and all nine of my roommates moving house. Outside the sky was sprinkling, the seasons had properly turned in our absence. Crumpled leaves littering the ground, shifting the color schemes of summer.

We are home, yet it no longer feels like only one city can claim that name. Has it been four days or three months? Time has left me entirely. (Something has shifted in all of us. Softened. Opening like hands to catch the things we hadn’t known were falling.) Home. The neighbors dogs are barking and I had forgotten the ways in which that signaled comfort. We had six packages on our front porch, an overflowing mailbox - the ghosts of time spent. The final show of the year has come and passed. Home. A strange and welcoming thing when you are not adjusted to it. Our bags, the reminders, thrown about the house. I wash my face and somehow I look younger. It feels as if the weeks have been saving up every Sunday to give us this one.