I took the dog for a walk around the block with her bandaged foot. She’s stopped limping, but I can’t let her off leash yet and we’re both bored by her incarceration. I’m not writing this in my office, a nice square room on the second floor of this house that I don’t seem to use for anything other than storing my books. It has my desk (which is Granny’s old kitchen table) and a chair, a nice view out over the trees of the neighbourhood backyards, but I can’t seem to settle there. When I first moved into this house, that was the room I slept in. I would lie on a mattress on the floor and look out at the dark patch of sky between the houses. Often I couldn’t sleep. Often I woke up not knowing where I was. This still happens. I wake up and don’t recognize this place as home, don’t recognize this life as my own. I have to shake my head, the way the dog shook her head to clear the fogginess of the anesthetic. I write from a chair in my bedroom at the front of the house on the second floor.
