My trailer hadn’t sold, but I had started living at the new place full time, only returning now and then to pick up my mail. The new house felt like a hotel full of doors and hallways and secret, unseen places. It was huge, the largest house I had ever stepped foot in. I only used a few rooms—my bedroom, the living room, the kitchen in the front of the house—feeling like a small animal relocated to a vast, foreign landscape, trying to form a nest that felt familiar. It took a while to get used to the idea that the house was mine, not some in-between place that was on loan to me, or a permanent hallucination. Often I thought of rich people who are rich from birth—how they must swagger through rooms like this, how free they must feel in their natural habitat, their birthright, whereas I visited each room in my new mansion as one would visit an exotic island, standing in the doorway and gazing in, amazed at how fabulous the light was! How high the ceilings were! The closet space—my god! Everything was a marvel. The lonely sun in winter and the locusts’ drone in summer drifted freely through the open windows. There was room for everything.

Despite the fresh air and good sleep, though, dread still pecked at me. For the first few weeks I spent my time walking aimlessly, getting lost in the woods for hours. After the constant hum of human noise had haunted me for so long, the quiet felt confrontational. I wandered around like a guest waiting for the host to arrive and tell me what to do.

I worried about myself. I remembered reading about astronaut training, how they strapped themselves into capsules, subjected themselves to g-force torture, to isolation chambers, all to see how much they could take. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made, and eventually I concluded that an experiment might answer my questions.

So, for a whole week, I camped out in the woods and pretended I was an intruder. What a thrill it was to look at the house from the tree line, an outsider once again! It’s delicious to spy on one’s self. During that week I watched the house from afar and imagined walking around in the rooms, what meals a person might cook in the giant kitchen. I fabricated an entire routine for the person who inhabited it—their fondness for certain spaces, their shitting and eating schedules, their mundane, bizarre habits done every day at the same time, thinking themselves invisible. I took notes.

In this way, I taught myself how to live there. It was the first in several new strategies that leaped up at me. My brain was plushing out again with activity where it had previously been flat, inert; it was now a fresh towel fluffy and warm and ready for soiling. When I returned to the house I truly understood the possibilities before me and was also aware of every weak entry point, every window and door and crawl space that needed to be secured. For the first time in my life, I became territorial. I looked out an upstairs window and surveyed the land spreading out before me, anger and pride rising up behind me, the need to protect and defend floating around me.