Three Weeks Out, One Week Back

I’ve started thinking of my own apartment less as a home and more as a base camp, which sounds dramatic written down but is genuinely closer to how the month is actually shaped. Three weeks somewhere else, one week here, and the week here has developed its own strange rhythm that took me a couple years to stop fighting and just accept. The first day back is always laundry and mail and a fridge that needs a real grocery run instead of gas station coffee. The second day I’m usually still catching up on sleep the road doesn’t quite let me get properly. By the third or fourth day I finally feel like a person living somewhere instead of someone passing through their own apartment, and then it’s almost time to pack the case again.

There’s a specific quiet to walking back into a place that’s been empty for three weeks straight. No mail piled past what the box can hold, because I’ve got that forwarded, but the air itself has a stillness to it, the rooms feel a size too big for one person’s stuff the way an apartment does when nobody’s been generating the small daily noise that makes a place feel occupied. I used to find that unsettling, coming home to a version of my own life that had been paused exactly where I left it. I’ve mostly made peace with it now, the same way you make peace with anything you can’t really change about a job you otherwise like.

What I didn’t expect is how much this rhythm has shaped what I actually want from the one week home. I don’t fill it with plans the way I used to try to. My game group here in Tulsa knows not to expect me most weeks and to make room when I’m actually back, which took some adjusting on everyone’s part, mine included. I’ve had to get comfortable with a version of belonging that’s intermittent instead of constant, showing up fully for one week and then genuinely gone for three, and trusting that the people who matter will still be there on the other side of it.

I don’t know if this is sustainable forever, and I try not to think about that too hard on a random Tuesday when I’m three weeks out and just trying to get through a service call. But right now, this particular shape of a month, it works for me in a way I wasn’t expecting when I started this job. Home is still home. It’s just home on a schedule that took me longer than it should have to stop resenting.