After over three months of not flying, I flew. It was not a decision I made lightly or by myself. A friend had warned me. “It’s weird when you’re first around people again.” And it was. It was hard not to think of everyone out there as “the enemy” if only to train myself in the new ways of being safe in the world. Don’t get any closer, I sometimes had to remind myself. I wrote about my journey back to Provincetown here.
 
The return yesterday was easier, new habits already forming. The good news is that so many are wearing masks. That’s also the weird news. It’s one thing to stay home where everything seems normal except that you're always at home. It’s another to be out in a masked world. Smiles don’t work. I was raising my hand in greeting for a while before I realized I could still speak.  
 
Earlier in the month I pulled about five books off my TBR stack and all of them went into the give-away box after a few pages until I got to this one—Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World published back in 1998. It was his writing that kept me reading, his love of language.
 
Imagine a snug little house in the suburbs, with a plaster dwarf on the lawn and petunias in the window boxes. Then imagine someone ancient and howlingly sad looking out through an upstairs window. That was Bobby’s face. That’s what it was about him.

Being back at my home at the end of the world after my longest absence since 2012 was heaven—all the windows open and the water crashing underneath. I loved being by myself, snacking instead of eating meals, watching “Bordertown” and “Little Fires Everywhere,” sitting in the dark listening to the tide come in, and seeing, in almost every storefront and so many homes along Commercial Street, signs that black lives matter.