Coming home is terrible… whether the dogs lick your face or not, whether you have... ...a wife, or just a wife-shaped loneliness waiting for you. Coming home is terribly lonely... so that you think of the oppressive barometric pressure back where you have just come from with fondness, because everything's worse once you're home. You think of the vermin clinging to the grass stalks... ...long hours on the road, roadside assistance and ice creams, and the peculiar shapes of certain clouds and silences with longing, because you did not want to return. Coming home is... just awful. And the home-style silences and clouds contribute to nothing but the general malaise. Clouds, such as they are, are in fact suspect and made from a different material than those you left behind. You yourself were cut from a different cloudy cloth, returned, remaindered, ill-met by moonlight, unhappy to be back, slack in all the wrong spots. Se
