Nothing on the walls yet, so the sound is wrong. Your voice comes back at you a half-second late, off the bare drywall, and you keep turning around expecting someone. There's a mattress on the floor, no frame. A single lamp you plugged into the only outlet you could find in the dark. Take-out container. Plastic fork.
I've done this move nine times. Base to base, country to country. You learn to read a room by how empty it is. This one still has the last tenant's nail holes, little constellations where their pictures used to hang, and you lie there mapping them because there's nothing else to look at.
People think the loneliest place a human can be is orbit. It isn't. Up there you are busy every waking minute, and Houston is talking in your ear, and the planet is right outside the glass, the whole warm crowded thing of it, close enough that you can pick out the lightning storms crawling across it at night, silent, all those cities under all that weather. You are never once alone up there. You just can't reach anybody.
Here you can reach everybody. That's the difference. Phone's in your pocket. You just haven't called, because it's late, and because there's nothing yet to report except a mattress and a fork.
That's the part I'd tell you if you asked, which you won't. The empty apartment isn't the sad thing. The empty apartment is the runway. Tomorrow the boxes come, and a chair, and eventually somebody's shoes by the door that aren't yours.
Tonight, though, sleep on the floor. Leave the lamp on.
It's the first light in this window in a while, and from far enough away, that's the only thing that ever showed.