While you were out

When I'm out of town for a little bit I'll sometimes have this weird feeling as though home is now a mysterious, far-off place. What happens when I'm not around? Is the landlord going through my apartment unbeknownst to me?

This latter question might sound like something a paranoid person would wonder, but it is rooted in actual experiences. I had one landlord who went into my place from time to time without advance notice, which always felt like a violation. Of course, landlords do have a right to enter--with notice--but since I don't always keep my living quarters as tidy as I should, I fret about access needed at an unexpected time. Go figure, I got home tonight and found one such notice for furnace inspection on Thursday. Fear confirmed.

There are also times when I'm elsewhere that it seems like home ceases to exist because it isn't my current reality, as though I'm the author of all I can see. For all I know, my home could have burned to the ground and I'd be none the wiser. (This thought has crossed my mind on more than one occasion.)

Maybe this sense that something is afoot while I'm away goes back to one summer that I went to camp and returned to find that my family had purchased a new television. I don't know why in particular this incident made such an impression on me. It's not like getting a new TV was a negative development in the order of coming home to find a pet is no longer around. Whatever the reason--I think it has to do with feeling out of the loop--to this day it is strange to me to go away for a short while and come back to find things changed, even a little.

What I'm getting at is that I left town on Friday morning and got back home tonight to find that one of my neighbors has moved out. You mean stuff was going on while I wasn't present?