6 months.

Half a year.

We all know how quickly time slips past, particularly as we progress in age. It doesn't make it any less weird or poignant (which adjective applies depends entirely on our moods and how much alcohol we consume). So when I realize that I've been Back Home for half a year now, I feel both amazed and unsurprised.

In June of 2008, I realized that I had lived in California longer than I had lived in Indiana. That was hard to take in--particularly since California still felt so foreign to me. And continued to do so, year after year. For just about 10 years, in fact. Even through marriage and a solid work environment and slowly resigning myself to the fact that I would live and die out there, it still never felt like home. When my husband and I bought our house in March of 2012, I went into a deep depression. There were a lot of reasons for it, but even then I knew that one of the reasons was because I was tied to California more firmly than ever, and owning a property in California was yet another indication that I'd never be able to return home.

Thank goodness, that turned out to not be the case. It took sacrifice and ugliness and even something a little bit close to sawing off my own leg, caught in a bear-trap, but I managed to escape. And so, on March 22 of this year, when I rolled into my new-old home of Bloomington, Indiana, I knew that California never felt like home because it never was home. I tried and I tried, but never fully. And I always resented it there.

I've been home for 6 months--basically, what, about 5% of the time I lived in California? I have 9.5 years to go before I exceed the time I spent in exile out in That Place. But I've been more happy here in these six months than I ever was in that California decade.

Unfortunately, I've also been rather silent on here about those 6 happy months. And so there are 6 months of my experiences with rainstorms (I squee every time there's rain in the forecast), my work (summary: I buy stuff) and my new work environment (big, pleasant, different) and my colleagues (so many people), my social life (God bless Meetup; I've met all sorts of socially awkward geeks and am starting to get a wee bit into gaming), my home (I rent a room from someone and it's a wonderful set-up financially) that I haven't really delved into. I'll try to be a bit better about that. Enough with this profound shit--when I am 60 or 70 or 80 and reading over these posts, I am not going to care about the deep revelations (and let's be honest, I'll be rolling my eyes over them anyway); I am going to want to know what I was seeing and doing and experiencing and so on.

So in my next 6 months, I'll try harder to document the process of Being Home. Let's see how that goes!