It was one week, yesterday, since I arrived in Virginia, and I have yet to unpack. My suitcases are no longer full, to be certain, but my clothes, books—the possessions that I deemed important enough not to leave behind in the huge bags that went to the goodwill—are strewn around the room, wrinkled, dirty, piled high. My room sits just at the top of the stairs, and my mother says the mess is making her crazy and that I must remedy it. I’d like to. Really, I would. But somehow packing those clothes away into drawers means I’m staying for the long haul, and I am just not ready to accept that yet. Certainly, clothes in drawers are no contract, no precursor for signing one’s life away. But when I’m transient, I act it, and don’t pretend to set-up “home away from home” by folding my clothes and arranging my things in nice little piles; I never use the drawers in hotels. Granted my house here is less a hotel than home primo, but really, at this point, out of college, I want it to be a stopping point, not a final destination. And even though all parties agree that I am only here until I regroup and get a job somewhere else, the fact that this could be months from now makes me a little bit crazy, and a little bit scared.

Tonight at dinner there was a showdown: mom and dad think I am disrespecting the way they run things (I am), and are offended by what they perceive as ingratitude about staying here (it is). It’s true: I don’t want to be here. But I have no money, no job, and no health insurance, so this has to be the place, at least for awhile. I am having a revelation here. I am living at home out of necessity, not because I am lame. And this doesn’t have to be a horrible thing: it offers things like free food, a bed, a puppy, and medical care should I have an accident while eating chocolate-covered almonds. And, though I hate, hate, hate to admit it, it offers another chance to hang with my parents, and to learn from them, because it seems that maybe, at least sometimes, they are right.