Lying in bed, I began to think about A Study of Short Stories. This was a class I took last Fall, before I knew I was going to move to a different state and thus pause my ever-continuing education. This one was at a college further away than the others I’d been attending. It required driving north on the 280 and exiting onto Skyline just before the arrival in Daly City. I drove this highway every week from August to December. That’s a big change. Warm summer to rainy winter. I was reading for that class, watching films for the film class, and listening to music for the music class. Each one was at a different college. I was going through a series of realizations about denial I’d been in and what I wanted from myself and others, which I had never stopped to consider until then. I had only one person who knew any of this, and she was someone I never met. It was a busy time. I began to think of the drive to that short story class. I thought of the long drive on empty roads at night, free of oncoming headlights and street lamps. I thought of my jeep’s radiator blowing up on the freeway and the cost of towing back to my apartment. I remembered driving by the San Bruno fires and seeing everyone at the college in a panic. I remembered Raymond Carver and Jindabyne. I remembered talking to students, people who were (somewhat) interested in literature and discussion of fictional works. I remembered the Russian gymnast with her aspirations to be a lawyer. During the course of all this thought, which mind you was a mere flash in time, my head started to stir. My chest tightened. I could not move for a minute or two until finally I stood and paced. I have space here—halls to tread, impatient, in the middle of the night. I mention this because before, during that busy time, I barely had room to sleep in. I still could not name the source of this feeling. It was not pain, nor confusion. It was an unfamiliar sensation. It was unease of the most unidentifiable kind, which, for someone like me, is the worst kind. An invisible aggressor, something inherent and profound enough to get me out of bed in the middle of the night. I don’t know what a panic attack is like, so thinking I had one is likely an overreaction. But it sure as hell was something. It might simply be that, finally, I miss the people and place I left behind.