I lay awake in bed last Thursday night, my stomach full of Thanksgiving food. I was in a fold-out sofa-bed in what used to be my childhood bedroom. Matt lay asleep in my arms. This had been my bedroom from age 3-14, and I used it occasionally again from age 17-25 on visits home from college or law school. A few years ago, my parents finally decided to remodel the room completely. They tore up the carpeting and cleaned the original wood floors, put up new wallpaper and paint, installed dark-brown wooden blinds over the windows, put in a new ceiling light fixture, got brand-new furniture, and hung things on the walls. It’s now a sitting room.

I used to have nightmares about cartoon witches in this room. I used to play with my Super Powers action figures and my Fisher-Price toys here. I used to stare out the windows at the kids on my block playing together while I stayed inside. I had my first sexual fantasies here. I secretly read “A Boy’s Own Story” here. This was MY place. My locus of personal development. The source of Me. And then it ceased to exist.

I thought back to all the Thanksgivings of the past.

These past four or five years, making the short trip from Jersey City to the suburbs.

Before that, the one year after law school when I was living at home.

Before that, the eight years of living in Virginia, during which I’d make the six- or seven-hour drive up from Charlottesville, sometimes giving one UVA friend or another a lift home; a combination of confusing feelings — sad to leave my friends for a few days, but excited to go home for Thanksgiving, and sadness at knowing it wouldn’t last long; feeling at home, but not quite; looking forward to recreating the Thanksgiving weekend I’d had the year before, but knowing that no two Thanksgiving weekends are the same.

That very first Thanksgiving home from UVA, when I stepped into my childhood home for the first time in more than three years, because my family and I had lived in Tokyo during that time. Everything in the house seemed smaller than I’d remembered.

Before that, the three years of Thanksgiving while living in Japan. One year we’d gone to Kyoto for a few days; one year we’d gotten together with a bunch of American Tokyo friends to properly celebrate the holiday (I can’t remember if we actually had a turkey); one year we’d gone to Hong Kong.

Before that, Thanksgiving during high school and middle school. During my freshman year (the last year before we moved), there was a treacly movie on TV (must have been this) about a small-town heartland family’s Thanksgiving, based on a Norman Rockwell painting; it made me pine for a small-town life.

Before that, ordinary Thanksgivings during middle school and elementary school. School letting out at 1 p.m. the day before; getting off the schoolbus in the early afternoon, bringing home a paper turkey in the shape of my hand, as well as a hand-written story about a turkey.

Before that, occasional trips to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade with my dad; afterward, we’d come home to find my mom cooking. That one time, when I was two or three, and it was freezing outside, and my parents bundled me up to go to the parade in a snowsuit so thick that I could have rolled down a hill.

Before that, a couple of Thanksgivings I can’t remember, because I was an infant. Before that, Thanksgiving 1973, when my mom was pregnant with me.

And before that… and before that… Thanksgivings without me, endlessly into the past.

I’ve had nostalgia for Thanksgiving ever since that freshman year of high school, watching that TV movie — knowing that I was growing up, that childhood would end, that more would soon be expected of me. More than half my Thanksgivings have involved some element of nostalgia.

Looking forward to recreating the Thanksgiving weekend I’d had the year before, but knowing that no two Thanksgiving weekends are the same.

Matt lay in my arms in my childhood bedroom, and suddenly I couldn’t remember what year it was, or what room I was in.