Letters on Dwelling and Displacement

Once a month this year, a letter—written from Kansas City as I prepare to leave, and from New Zealand where my friend has recently arrived.

Slowly. Without plan. From what we notice.

Letter I

You are in New Zealand and I am in Kansas City, and for a week I have been trying to write the first sentence of this letter.

This morning I could not find my copy of the Purgatorio. It is not where it should be.

I stood in front of the shelf longer than I needed to. At some point I realized I had already stopped thinking of this house as the place where things are where I left them.

I did not look for it anywhere else. There are other books on the shelf that are not where I remember leaving them, but I have not checked them closely. It seemed possible that I would find them and that they would not be the same books I thought they were. I left the room without deciding anything about it.

Sally was in the dining room when I came through, folding something that had already been folded once. I think it was one of the children’s things, but I did not look closely. There are a few boxes now, not many. Some of them are open. Nothing in them seems finished. The house is still in use, but not in the same way.

It occurs to me, a little after the fact, that I have already begun to think of this place as something that will need to be remembered rather than something that can still be relied on. I am not sure when that happened. It is not something I decided.

There are rooms I pass through now without fully entering them. Not because there is anything in them that I am avoiding, but because they no longer seem to require the same kind of attention. I notice that I am already moving differently through the house, more quickly in some places, more slowly in others.

Outside, the street is the same. A car passed while I was standing there, slowly, as if the driver were looking for something. I did not recognize it. The trees have begun to change, but not fully. There are a few days now where the light stays longer than expected, and then disappears all at once.

There is a point in the late afternoon when the house feels briefly suspended. The children are still occupied somewhere else, the evening has not yet begun, and there is nothing that requires immediate attention. It is at that hour that the shift is most noticeable, though I would not have known to look for it if it had not already been underway.

You are already further along in this than I am. I imagine there are things there that no longer feel provisional, even if they are not yet secure. Or perhaps it is the opposite. I do not know how it appears from your side.

There are objects in the house that I have not decided about. Not large things. Books mostly, and a few smaller things that do not seem to belong to any category that would justify carrying them or leaving them. I have moved some of them more than once.

There is a drawer in the bedroom that I opened yesterday without remembering why. Inside it were things that had not been touched for some time. I recognized them, but not in a way that required anything of me. I closed the drawer again without taking anything out. Later, I could not remember which drawer it had been.

The Purgatorio has not reappeared. I have not asked anyone about it.

I have begun, without fully admitting it, to think of certain things as no longer belonging to this place, though they have not yet been removed from it. This includes not only objects but habits — ways of moving through the day that seem less necessary now. There are moments where I notice myself beginning something and then stopping, not because it cannot be finished, but because it no longer seems to lead anywhere that remains.

At the same time, nothing has been formally concluded. The routines of the day continue. Meals are prepared. Conversations take place. There is no outward sign that anything has changed, except perhaps in the small pauses that have begun to appear where there used to be continuity.

I am writing this at the table where I usually sit, but the arrangement of things on it has changed slightly. There is more space than there was before, though nothing has been fully removed. It is not an emptying, exactly. Something closer to a loosening.

I have not yet begun to say goodbye to anything.

Next: May 2026