Whose house is this?

I've always been ridiculously sentimental about beginnings and ends of things. Lately I've been finding myself admiring the gardens of my neighbors in the Palisades, or pausing outside houses that I'm sure I'll never walk past again to take in their perfect doorways or fences, saying to myself "this is the last time you'll ever see this door knocker, Gwynne, say goodbye."

I feel like the past 3 years have been filled with goodbyes to people and places that I never really intended to leave; drafty apartments in Ithaca, the unremarkable Dallas skyline, and now my picturesque neighborhood in DC with its entirely too perfect wooded trails and sidewalks. I think of Schuyler, how he's plodded along beside me at each locale and waited for me behind dozens of doors. I have to wonder how many more houses we'll adopt together before settling down in a true home. There has been so little permanency to each of my "homes" since I graduated that I feel like I've been living in a perpetual state of not-quite-belonging... I'm not sure what it will take to shake that feeling of displacement.

I guess most things in life are better articulated by a Nobel prize winning writer--

Whose house is this? 

Whose night keeps out the light

In here?

Say, who owns this house?

It's not mine.

I dreamed another, sweeter, brighter

With a view of lakes crossed in painted boats;

Of fields wide as arms open for me.

This house is strange.

Its shadows lie.

Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key? 

Toni Morrison