Boymeat

As those who have visited my home in the past know all full well... I can be a bit of a slob.

When left to my own devices, my apartment sometimes gets forgotten in the hustles and bustles of life. Clothes get thrown on the floor, newspapers and boxes completely and totally succeed at avoiding the recycling room downstairs, and various scraps of paper and wrappers fail to find their way to the trash receptacle.

Would one go as far as calling it a bachelor pad? Perhaps... though I think bachelor pads are generally cleaner.

So when kathryntact came up to NY last Friday for her final visit to NY as a non-New Yorker, I was both ecstatic and scared out of my wits. Ecstatic to see her and have her going to slumber and waking up with me daily for a week. Yet, horrified because she would see that state of my apartment and truly decide that beheading me would be a much more satisfying option than living with me.

Thankfully, I am still in possession of my head, one week later. But it was close. Real close.

It was a week of cleaning (more her than me), apologizing (so much of the me), time with friends, dining in, snuggling on the couch watching TV, geeking out on books or video games, and sex. (Gotta slip the sex in there.) In one week, my apartment has transformed itself from tornado victim to... home.

Her books are on the shelves next to mine. Her DVDs mingle and party with mine. A photo of her mother clutching a baby Kathryn sits on the shelves next to the bed. It feels good.

kathryntact drove back home yesterday afternoon, and I did not feel sadness per se as I knew it will be mere weeks until we see each other again, and then begin seeing each other a whole lot more (i.e. daily, living together, oh dear lord she's gonna learn to hate me kind of thing.) Instead of sadness, I felt loneliness.

You see, a clean apartment is a wonderful thing, yes. But all that clutter that I had before takes up space. Lots of it. And it makes the apartment feel crowded and tight and cramped. But now that everything is where it should be, after bags and boxes of stuff leaving the apartment for parts unknown, after the great reveal of more floorspace than anyone ever knew I had... the apartment is open. Way open. Wide clean empty spaces everywhere you look.

And it's lonely in there now. I laid in bed last night looking around my apartment, and wondered what was missing.

And I can honestly say kathryntact was missing. It doesn't feel like home without her now.