still here

I returned to this campus three years ago today feeling hopeful, relieved, thankful.  There's something so strange about being in the same place you were at 18.  It's like standing still, but not quite.  You pass a bench, a building, and everything is familiar.  You can see, in blurred flashbacks, the person you once were (and sometimes still are).  The spot where you had your heart broken feels so tender but so does the one where you sat with friends, drinking gin out of coffee mugs, daydreaming about the mundane and the spectacular.

I am reminded, on nearly every walk I take from my office, of the ways in which this landscape has sewn itself to me.  It's humbling to walk past the places you once cried -- over a grade, over a boy, over nothing at all -- and the ones where you triumphed.  It was here that I became myself, a mess of good and bad decisions, with poems and cheap wine and gallons of coffee.
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