(written early this morning when i couldnt get online)

Two nights ago I looked at my room and felt so empty.

In elementary school, towards the end of the year I remember watching the teachers slowly take the posters off the wall, the uneventful beansprout science projects would go home and eventually there would be nothing left in the room but desks and bare cinderblock walls. The teacher�s desk was void of personal pictures and papers and pictures we had drawn for her

There was just nothing

That is what my bedroom was. Completely devoid of life. Horrible empty. I could have sworn I heard my voice echo and could see my breath. It was the one moment that made it amazingly clear to me that I was not living here anymore.

I could hardly sleep that night, not because I was anxious as I thought I would be. It was as if I were sleeping somewhere foreign. The bare walls were not mine, the empty nightstand was more like that of a hotel room than my bedroom for the past eighteen years.

I don�t know how to handle that not being home anymore.

I have always said I didn�t feel like I belonged in that town, or in the house. As though it weren�t my home. And even if that is true . . . it is the closest thing to a home I have ever had.

Within and hour of moving into my dorm yesterday it looked like I lived there. The familiar books from my shelf, my posters desk lamp, and this cloud of clutter that somehow manages to follow me everywhere I go. The cloud is currently residing on my roommates unused bed.

Around midnight I decided to rearrange the room, I don�t know why exactly. I just began moving and sliding furniture around, by myself. I have created a sort of cave for myself around my bed. My bed is shoved into a corner where it lines up with the majority of the big beautiful window in the room, and on the long side with no wall the back of my desk is pushed up against it with Salvador Dali�s �persistence of memory� posted for me to stare at as I sleep. I was wonderful when I finally climbed into bed last night, it was as if I created a different room within my room, a place that was mine.

I keep thinking of all these things I should have brought that I didn�t. my dream catcher, or yet another book or some trinket that I loved dearly yet somehow forgot about.

I woke up this morning at 7:37 and I couldn�t go back to sleep. My alarm wasn�t set to go off till 8:00. For the first time this summer I actually saw the morning. For once I didn�t sleep till noon.

When I drove here yesterday I saw mountains in the distance.

I have never lived anywhere with mountains in the distance.