Only one more lonely Monday to go. This time next week, I'll be on the downward slide to gone. Already the kitchen cupboards are nearly bare: three drinking glasses, three coffee cups, three plates linger behind the blank glass doors. Shelves are empty. Bedrooms are stacked with boxes. Outside, piles of roofing trash wait for a dumpster. I feel as if someone else, someone not at all like me, inhabits this skeleton dwelling. Someone like me would never walk so calmly past a pile of trash in her yard.

Today's tedious project is to finish flushing the chlorine out of the water system. The cold water is in good shape, but the hot water still smells like a swimming pool. As I run water recklessly from the taps, I'll also be starting a manuscript-consultation project, and considering the embryonic angles of another political essay, and stuffing things into boxes, and copying out a few Clifton poems, and filling out change-of-address forms, and comforting a clingy cat, and imagining making dinner for Tom every single night of the week. That will be a pleasure for us both.