May 28, 2002 | 10:11 PM

The apartment looks beautiful. Spotless.

The carpet in my bedroom is clean enough to be lickable. I�m sure that thousands of poor little germies were sucked up in a Hoover instigated massacre this weekend while I was away.

The wood floors gleam brighter than Pat Boon�s teeth.

Everything has been put in its proper place.

And those things of mine that have no proper place have been thrown in a box and shoved in my closet.

The box is full of strange odds and ends: Shoes. A stuffed rabbit John bought me for my birthday. Scribbled in notebooks. Pens that ran out of ink years ago. Three year old magazines with forgotten indie/alterna-bands on the covers.

I always feel strange when I come back to the apartment and it looks like this, as though I have entered some other dimension. In this clean orderly universe I expect John to arrive home from The Stupid Company wearing a suit and a bowler hat. He would make himself a dry martini, read The New York Times, and smoke apple flavored tobacco out of a pipe. All conversation would revolve around The Nasdaq or Tchaikovsky�s 6th. And nobody would yell or cry or swear in an apartment so� so sparkle fresh. So free from dirt and chaos.

I am not ungrateful. I appreciate the enormous amount of work that went into making everything look so neat and unruffled. Especially since I know how much of it was my mess.

(O the guilt)

It just makes me feel strange. As though I don�t live here.

In a way, I already feel like I don�t anymore.

Once I know what it is I�m after, I�m three miles ahead, on to the next thing.

It all feels like a million years ago. It�s like I�m gone already. The rest is just epilogue.