On days where I'm tired and don't know better, I think about married life, far away from here. There's a soft, warm spot in my head where I leave at sunrise, come home at sunset to hot chicken sandwiches, cold beer, soft kisses on the porch. Cool, clean sheets. Things so far away that I question if I've drifted into the daydreams of someone else.

Maybe I've lost that chance. Maybe I'm tired because I've spent what feels like a long time running from it. Or maybe it's easy to want to fall back onto something like that in the temperate shade of this: the valleys in the sine wave of life and living. Maybe I'll wake up tomorrow tuned to something different.

I've worked in some houses, so big and so beautiful, but so empty. So vast that it's hard not to get lost. So hollow that in spite of the warm wooden tones and strategic floods of sunlight, fixtures, and bright matte goldenrod paint newly applied this season, it all feels cold.

The real price of a place like that, sometimes. You put so much money into a house, everything in your life, maybe, that it becomes impossible for it to ever be a home. 

I'm scared of that. I run from that. It isn't the lacking of love that has ever been the problem for me. It's the fear of watching it fade away in the shadow of success or the tiredness of time. The way I feel right now, wanting to fall back onto something so familiar, but so far away, and just continuing to drop instead of landing.