The radio in the studio carries news of humans circling the moon again, or planning to, the details blur into the general category of ambitious human projects that require leaving home. Dad adjusts the volume slightly. The voice continues its inventory of rockets and trajectories while I catalog what has gone quiet.

Chanel’s precise steps on hardwood. The particular way she claimed a corner of any room, not by settling into it but by arriving and making it hers. The small authority of her presence that somehow filled more space than her actual size suggested.

The morning routine proceeds, cookie, breakfast supervision, the return to whatever patch of floor calls to me. But something has shifted in the margins. Gus notices too, though he processes absence the way he processes most things: by moving through his circuit with the same measured attention, pausing slightly longer at corners where scents linger.

The muddy trails will dry. The temperature will remember April is not meant to feel like late spring. Daylight saving will end soon and throw everyone’s internal clock into brief chaos, mine included, though I have never understood why humans insist on arguing with time itself.

What strikes me about moon missions is the precision required. The calculations, the timing, the absolute necessity of knowing exactly where you are before you attempt to go anywhere else. Perhaps this is why the radio holds my attention this morning. The voice describes orbital mechanics while I sit in a house that suddenly contains more quiet than it did a month ago.

Some departures happen with suitcases and car rides. Others happen without sound at all — no door closing, no engine starting. Just the gradual recognition that a particular quality of attention has lifted from the world. The way afternoon light hits the living room unchanged, but the room itself has become something slightly different.

Gus appears in the studio doorway, considers the sofa, settles instead on the rug near the desk. His presence is solid, immediate. The radio continues its catalog of human ambitions. Somewhere between rocket fuel and launch windows, I realize that home is not just the place you return to from space. It is also the place that holds the shape of everything that has moved through it, even after the moving stops.

The cookie jar maintains its position on the desk. Some orbits, it seems, are more reliable than others.

~P.W.