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I'm home. St. Moo gives a two-day mid-semester break, so I'm here for my four-day weekend, sleeping late and doing laundry for free. Normally this would be a good thing, a happy thing. I like my family.

And it is a good thing, except it doesn't feel like home anymore.

I walked into the computer room and saw thick, new, cream-colored carpet. After looking around I discovered it's all over the house. The stairs, the bedrooms, the hallways. It's like an entirely different house. Everything's so... white.

Last time I visited, we had the same comfy old brown carpet. The brown carpet that's mushed to a pulp from eighteen years of bare feet, carpet wrestling, scandalous in-front-of-the-TV snacks, re-arranging of furniture, and "uh-oh, don't tell Mommy" moments. It couldn't have been more than a millimeter thick. But it was home.

Now I look around and it feels like a hotel. Or a bed and breakfast. Or something. Something I don't belong in.

My room is the worst, because they converted mine and my sister's rooms to guest rooms. They took down all my posters and mementos, filled in the tack holes, painted the yucky-pink walls white (I thought it was pretty when I was eleven), put in a double bed, rearranged the furniture, and put everything personal of mine in the closet for me to sift through later for possible Salvation Army donations. And of course there's that new carpet.

I don't live here anymore. It's very depressing. I don't look around my room and see my prom pictures and schizo-acid-trip-rainbow posters, my comfortable clutter, my glow-in-the-dark ceiling stars, my yearbooks and writing anthologies from seventh grade on.

I'm a visitor. I didn't murmur when they changed a thing or two last year, when I first moved out. Hey, I liked having a queen bed instead of a twin. But now it's not my room anymore. It's not my house.

I feel a bit homeless.

(Not to mention melodramatic. Oh boy.)

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