I’ve written before about the crash that comes at the end of fire season. The sudden removal of long days full of meaningful work and the same people, all up in yo’ bizness, at all hours of the day and night. The immediate revocation of a type of intimacy that isn’t mirrored in family homes or “normal” workplaces.

This time, coming off of a month-long assignment, my mom reminded me to be ready for the let-down. She’s watched me come off the high of a fast-paced fire to the nothingness of an empty house and a social circle that has forgotten me in the months I’ve been out of the game.

The last several years, coming “home” hasn’t really been that for me. The musty smell of a yurt and nest of sleeping bags in the back of my rental car has come to feel more like home than the places I have lived lately. I like my house. I like my bed. I like to be on a couch and be able to stare mindlessly at a remote control and remember that there is nothing worth watching. I like having dogs piled on me like cordwood, squished into the cracks of the couch in their malleable wrinkled shapes. But I feel lost. I feel like I should be calling someone. Reporting to someone. Fixing some problem. Producing something… But there is nothing to be produced. No one to call or report to. Just me, and dogs, and an empty refrigerator with no helpful ideas about what’s for dinner.

I keep opening airline websites and hotel apps to make plans for something. Anything. Maybe I’ll go to Mexico with my kids for Thanksgiving. Maybe I’ll disappear to an unnamed beach alone. Maybe I’ll turn up at a distillery in Scotland. Or maybe I will close my laptop and just stare at the ceiling.

I need to go to the store, but buying a block of cheese feels like a commitment I am not ready to make. Even the bottle of wine on the counter does not enthrall me. The Gentleman Jack that I opened months ago reprimands me from the shelf for my abandonment. But even he holds no sway.

This is my meditation. It will pass, the nothingness. I will show up, one day soon, in the wilderness of society and the language of “regular” relationships will begin to return to my tongue. But for now I can lie quietly, wondering about this space between my two lives. Enjoying the silence broken only by the dogs and their ritual wild times. Looking forward to something that I don’t know. Maybe it’s lunch. Maybe it’s sleep or a bubble bath. Maybe it’s a new job or moving across the country, Maybe it’s all six seasons of Peaky Blinders in one binge, with Cream of Chicken soup at 2 AM. I wouldn’t rule it out.