01.28.2002 - 5:35 p.m.

The Writing Center opened today. I like tutoring days- there are spans of three, four hours at a time where I just get to help people and never have to invent work for myself or worry about impressing someone important.

Although I had a great weekend, I spent most of it thinking about that sort of thing.

My friend B was staying here, down from College Park. I also saw a lot of M, who just transferred in for this semester. (The three of us are old friends from high school.) So I spent my weekend with two people who are relatively new to the area. I suppose it�s silly to think this way, but it felt like a lot of responsibility. I love it here, and I want my friends to understand and agree. It�s important to me. It doesn�t help that it�s only when I am trying to explain my attachments to someone that I notice all the problems with this place�like the fact that there really is nothing to do here. Or that I actually enter skeezy bars hoping for a good time. Worse, that my standard weekend involves way too many movies and not nearly enough actual living.

But I do love it here. I stayed here after I graduated because I couldn�t think of anywhere in the world I would rather be. It has never been terribly important to me where I am at any given moment; I never understood why the other kids needed to go home during sleepovers. I am always up for a trip, and while I�m on the move, I never wake up and wonder where I am. I�ve been homesick a few times, but never for the place itself. In fact, I only get homesick when I am actually at my parent�s home, because I miss my old friends, my parents, my brothers. I miss being near them all and not questioning that our proximity would always be the case. But I never miss the place itself. There are thousands of places that would be home enough to me.

Places are still important, though. Life is better when you can walk outside after a shitty day and seeing something absolutely beautiful. I want always to live in a place where the grey days are like hugs after a good cry. And it means something, a big something, to have a place that�s mine. My apartment is an outpost from which to base the expeditions of my life; perhaps a little less solid, a bit less carefree, than my original home, but I am not so blind to wish it different.

You can�t say all this to people you�ve known for years but not seen since the summer; the thoughts swim around your head, mixed in with all the �wow, she�s changed,� and �dammit I�m out of clean glasses again,� but they never quite gel until that last night, or even in the car on the way to work the next morning. Somewhere comfortably alone. That�s when it occurs to you that being with them, driving them to the point at three in the morning, listening to one charm the park ranger into letting you stay while the other one stares openmouthed at the stars, these moments will always be perfect. These people will always be your home.

-stonebridge

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