But no one ever tells you that forever feels like home, sitting all alone inside your head

I've been home for just under 48 hours now.

It feels very surreal. I still haven't quite caught up to the fact that I am home, that this is where I live, that this is normal.

Everything feels wrong. My car is wrong, the house is wrong, the bathroom's in the wrong place, I'm forgetting how to get places.

The time we spent in Maryland was so intense that it was like an entire life shrunk down to 6 weeks.

I now fully believe Williams Gibson's theory of jet lag: that it's the soul being far behind the body, waiting to be reeled in to rejoin the whole. I feel like I've left my soul in a box somewhere, and I may never find it again.

I'm a wholly different person than the one who set out on this journey at the beginning of March. I ordered a few things over the course of my stay, things that were delivered here at home, and the things I bought at the beginning of the journey I look at now and wonder why I wanted them. What did that Lisa think these would bring to her life? The now-Lisa is just confused by them.

I am exhaustion incarnate. I'm not sure who I am anymore, or what my purpose is.

I let my past go too fast, no time to pause

Today we get our first glimpse at the progress of Jay's treatment in the clinical trial. Even though I know better than to have hope, my heart is still raw with it.

The past couple of weeks have been very hard, as Jay has struggled with his food issues. I've developed related food issues of my own, which have been good in one sense as I'm trying to lose weight, but difficult in another, as I feel like we've both been badly trained around food.

These weeks of difficulty on top of the previous weeks of treatment have worn me down to nothing. My emotions are always at the surface - you don't even have to scratch the surface to get to them. They're just right there, perfectly present.

I'm pinning all my hopes on our flight home tomorrow, even as I know how difficult that will be.  I just want to be home, whatever that brings.

We are ready for the siege, we are armed up to the teeth

Many little things make a post:

• Jay & I are on opposite but related trajectories with food these days. He's struggling to get back to a place where eating is natural and normal. Every bite of food may turn into a deadly enemy. I, on the other hand, have gained so much weight through stress eating that I've started doing Weight Watchers again. I've gotten so heavy that all my joints ache; I'm a fine-boned girl, and any weight over 200 lbs is genuinely painful. Jay's having to train his body to accept food; I'm having to train my body to stop accepting food.
• I'm so homesick I could cry. And sometimes do.
• While in truth this place of waiting to see if the latest treatment has worked on Jay is no different than any other place of waiting to see, it feels worse. I think that's in part because the lead-up to the treatment itself was so brutal. So this waiting feels many orders of magnitude harder.
• We've spent more time this year in Maryland than in Oregon.
• I got a ridiculous thrill when I gave the Ocean City hotelier my Oregon driver's license when we checked in. It's such a silly thing, but it made me feel like a real person.
• Every time I think I've discovered the limits of possible exhaustion, I push right through and find more levels. I can't remember when I was last this tired. And I cannot fail - right now, I'm Jay's sole support. So I persevere, hoping not to do anything irredeemably stupid.