Aaron M. Fortkamp

We’re in Savannah now. We are in Savannah, now. I say it because that’s where we are. We don’t live in Pittsburgh anymore, but we don’t live in Savannah yet. Maybe it’s because the dog isn’t here. The cats are. Pavel has been strutting around like he owns the place from minute one, but Mojo just emerged from his hiding spot tonight, after about 24 hours hiding between the bed and the wall.

Today I looked for living arrangements. Domiciles. Habitable abodes. I found one and thought surely this is it, the one, the first one and the one. It looks like plenty of space empty but it’s only got two rooms, and though it is far closer to Gretchen’s work than I’d expected we would find, the next house had not only an extra bedroom but also a bonus living room, and a breakfast nook, and a laundry room, and a garage, and a mud room leading to the back yard, and in comparing the two I found the original place wanting. Oh and it’s got an extra bathroom. But it’s about twenty bonus minutes on the drive, and that’s in light traffic.

Then we went to the beach. I followed my wife out onto the sand with my camera and took her picture like I’ve seen people take pictures of their wives on the sand, and we promised each other we wouldn’t take this for granted, we would come to the beach because we live near the beach, and in that expression of desires for our future here I began to feel just a glimmer of a realization, that we have a future here.

She sleeps, now. It’s been a long six months, for us, for the country. I can’t fault her it. In our future that we’ve been trying to build, I would retire now to some separate bedroom/office/mudroom/porch and be writing there, I can feel the headspace coming on like a helmet, with the wind in the palms outside my window or otherwise just beyond the periphery, so too my wife, her presence felt and comforting and perhaps comforting because she sleeps and I know I won’t disturb her and in fact nothing will disturb her for eight hours or more, not the wind, not the palms, not my click-clacking, not my mental state, not the dog, who with the moon’s rise falls into his own dreary slumber, and I know she is comfortable, and I know she is happy, and I know she is safe, and I know what is love, and I know where is home, and I write.

But where will this be, is the question. For now we’re in a hotel, and the cats’ adjustment period lasted far into the night last night, and I turned off the movie so the ambient noise is gone, and the click-clack sounds promising to rouse her, and my head helmet is already chinked like armor and letting in distractions, because I’m out of practice so. Tomorrow there will be waffles in the lobby and then another house to see and perhaps more depending on what’s posted online tonight, and we want to visit the dog because in the past three weeks he’s spent more time in the kennel than out, and his little heart must be near to breaking with abandonment issues rearing their sharp-point heads. This hotel is fine an inexpensive but it doesn’t have a separate room, and right now we don’t have separate lives, we have our marriage life which is always going to be there but our individual lives are more often coinciding, coincidental, concentric, convivial, all of these but what’s the word, consequential, in sync, synchronous, sympatico, side-by. And marriage is between two people, so we can’t be the same person and have a marriage, can we.

Oops, I coughed. She wakes. Time to sleep.