Bleh.

A friend told me recently this would always be her home. I responded that I had none...not to be pathetic, but to explain my reality of perpetual foreignness: my family was never from where we were living--and living in a stream of small towns, my Otherness was quite palpable. Fleeing to cities and ignoring invitations to ten-year reunions, I realized how utterly free I am. I'm moving to D.C. in less than a year, and it's as easy to me as moving apartments. Moving comes naturally; transition comes naturally; being a stranger comes almost dishearteningly easily...But staying still, moving to the center from the periphery, becoming familiar: these things, they horrify me.

And now, I wonder if I'll ever feel the reverse freedom: the freedom of being tethered, of being comfortable and entrenched...
I kick and struggle against the lightest of reins--my commitment to a graduate program for 4 years has come with anxiety attacks--and I wiggled out of a final year by winning a fellowship relocating me to DC; my commitment to an occupation was only made palatable by the realistic possibility of complete job-switching within five years. I clearly have not yet found a similar fix for a commitment to a person.

I suppose it's all the same experience, but perhaps from the other side of the mirror. But it really can be quite lonely over here.