Computers: Just another way to feel rootless

It should feel like I'm at the end of a race, but getting my husband back on Friday was just another checkpoint on this unbearably long road to stability.

Even though I'm in a familiar room with a familiar person and piles of familiar stuff around us (including familiar sheets on the bed), I can't return to the comfort of how things were three months ago.

My computer is different, half of my desk is gone, and the bed is arranged differently, too. Drawing could help ground me, anchor me to something safe, but with my physical and digital workspaces being altered, I can't find that studio so easily.

Drawing was a zen practice when I could give my computer loose parameters and be offered a delightful selection of references. Now I am much more conscious of being involved in picking out what I'm drawing. It's a choice rather than an assignment, and therefore I judge my performance more harshly.

Emotionally, I'm out of sorts, too. I have Reagan here with me, but the 10 days we have together are fewer than the days apart before and the days apart after this phase. I can't get too comfortable. And yet I can't prepare for what I'm doing for the month during his combat training, or even the 2.5 months of schooling that will follow that.

This is the last lap (I so very much hope) of multiple years of rootless limbo, but truly things are darkest before the dawn.