It’s been just over a week since my last exam of the year, packing in a fury and bounding home to Ohio in a storm of lost gates, missed flights and weather delays. Old friends, wedding festivities, and a generosity of ice cream helpings later, I finally feel myself emerging from the cloud of exhaustion and excitement that was this year.

The quiet (and unexpectedly cool evenings) of suburban Cleveland have been a much welcome interlude – on Saturday I’m making the cross country trek to see Mark in the bay for a few days before we both fly back east to move into our new apartment in New York. I’m moving across the street and he’s moving across the country, but it feels less like the big moving-in-together this time around and more like a reshuffling of belongings – mine from the dorm filled with things that did not belong to me in a shared space that I feel like I’ve been borrowing, and his – from spaces never fully occupied with suitcases never fully unpacked. Mark proudly declares to our friends that it’s because he prefers to live like a minimalist. He could never be bothered to make a space livable, though he does not complain when I do it for the both of us.

Though I admit I’ve always been the self-designated appointer of spaces, I had not expected to be as affected by the space around me as I have been this past year – constantly lamenting the feeling of being a stranger in my own home, feeling anxious at the sight of couches, cushions, forks and knives long since left behind by doctors-in-training past. So much so that I could barely bear to spend any time in my own apartment, opting instead to occupy corners of neighborhood coffee shops, the aromas of overpriced espresso lingering in my hair and clothes.

By January, I had decided enough was enough. I had been woken up by enough loud conversations and mysterious music playing at odd hours to decide I was too old for shared spaces. Mark and I made the trek downtown to officially domestically partner up and prove that our application for the school’s couples housing was legitimate.

In exchange for 35 dollars and a few vague questions answered through a sheet of plexiglass, we received a very official looking piece of paper, that upon close reading, ended up meaning mostly nothing.

In May, Mark left his job in San Francisco, and I started looking for furniture in earnest.

There have been differences to consider since our last reshuffling, three summers ago when we moved into an airy and bright, if small 4^th floor walkup above Newbury St. 

Boston was the first place we lived together, and Sunday mornings we tumbled down the old brownstone steps, past the ground floor Italian restaurant (with a penchant for setting off the building fire alarm) onto rarely silent sidewalks. The early runs along the Charles that started and ended at those old double doors will always hold special sentiment. In Boston, where we each struggled and strived to find our places in the world of enterprise and fortune, there was striving to find how our lives would fit together. When I wasn’t working late, and when the green line functioned at its predictable slow clip, Mark would get back in time for dinner. The trader joes up the block served as private pantry, at the ready for replenishing whatever ingredient had run low. On any given Tuesday evening Mark would come home with a bottle of gerolsteiner under one arm and a bunch of bananas under the other.

But more often than not, I ate a dinner of cold sushi from Douzo at my desk, staring at a massive color coded mess of numbers. Then walked home to find Mark also still on a conference call with someone in California. We’d crawl into bed after banishing outlook for a few precious hours, watch an episode of Downton Abbey (which I forced Mark to like, or if he hated it he did a good job of hiding) before falling asleep, dreaming of PowerPoint.   

Gratefully, it has been a while since my last PowerPoint dream, this year of physiology and biochemistry and so, so much medicine buffering current and previous lives.

This current life if only for a week – of pause and leisurely book reading (!) and day dreaming and if I’m honest – a healthy amount of fretting (as I always do with time on my hands) sails by suggesting it just might last forever – until the suitcases get repacked, borrowed spaces returned, and its time to be off again.