I’m fighting the blues. The marathon is over and it was anticlimactic. My much-anticipated tropical vacation is over, and I returned to a cold rain and a house that doesn’t feel like home.

I’ve been missing my old apartment but I’m trying not to think about it. Maybe that’s the wrong approach and I should let myself wallow in it and get it out of my system. The truth is I don’t trust this feeling, this nostalgia, this sludgy grief and regret. I suspect it’s not as much about my old apartment as it is about my old life, my drinking life. It’s about long hazy afternoons in bed with a bottle and a book. It’s about the perfect ephemeral happiness of rushing headlong down the stairs to meet the dealer who's waiting for me outside in the car. It’s about walking in from work and making a drink before I even took my coat off. It’s about the alcohol and drug-induced conviction that I was in the catbird seat, that things were going great, that my tiny gritty sunny apartment was the axis upon which the crazy sexy fascinating world turned.

This morning I was in the new kitchen picking up an orange I had dropped when I saw a big bug. Although it looked kind of like a roach I immediately knew it was not a roach. It was slower, taller and shinier, and it did not evoke in me the usual roach-response of disgust, horror and shame. I guessed it was a waterbug. I’d always thought waterbugs were mythical creatures people invented to avoid admitting they had roaches. I thought about smushing it, but it was kind of big for smushing and besides, what’s the point of having roommates if not for bug-smushing? As I watched it amble thoughtfully around I suddenly felt happy. I thought, I can love this house, this waterbug-house. Then I saw another one and I got out of there.

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