I think the most helpful thing I have realized while visiting and working in D.C. over the past week is how important it is to be near friends and family. I guess something has changed in me over the past several years. Perhaps it was right around having met Toby, I’m not sure. But either way, I have realized that part of my happiness as a person relies on being surrounded by – or at least near – friends and family.

I went out for dinner the other night with Missy. Like most friends who see each other after moving apart, we caught one another up on new machinery. I found myself introducing her to my feelings about living out west, she told me about her recent weekend in Toronto and her thoughts about her future. We both talked about loneliness and feeling bored. Our stories, as if new to even ourselves, stumbled around a bit, newly equipped with words. Before I knew it I was thinking out loud, trying to figure out why I have felt so down the past few months, why I have felt so crazy, why I feel that my voice has changed.

Since returning here I haven’t felt at all crazy. I haven’t felt lonely or lost, confused or totally displaced. I have missed Toby and my cats (which I have said probably a hundred times in my own head and maybe 99 times on here) but I haven’t felt lost. And though I have been without home since arriving here (I’m living out of a suitcases, sleeping a strange bed, and I have no Toby) I feel more at home here then I have in the 5 months living in San Francisco. That’s a strange feeling, considering.

There are a hundred clichés about what “home” is. And there’s a reason they’re overused all the time. I’m going to turn an old cliché (about home) into a familiar cliché thereby making it a place I will go back to every time I feel lost.

Home is where the heart is.

And it seems my heart is in a number of places east. My heart is in the Fall. My heart is growing in a pumpkin patch. It rides on the back of a box turtle along a green tree-lined sidewalks, and in hot cups of cider or coffee if you feel a little sleepy. My heart is a part of every snowfall and sounds off every clickety clack of every icicle tree. My heart is beneath a blue tarp-covered empty pool. It runs through rainfalls at night, and dozes during windy mornings. I enjoy all the old familiar seasonal smells. I like the crickets and pesky dusk bugs. I love wet leaves and ground that feels like cardboard.

I kinda like the cliché. All my life I have avoided a “home” due to my desire for forced individuality and discovering new ground.

Truth is, I’ll go anywhere Toby wants me to go. I’ll be at his side no matter what happens. I can promise this. Entirely. But there is a part of my heart that, should he wish to be with its better half, the part easiest to love, is happiest when it’s in the company of friends and surrounded by the familiarity of emotion.

I have mentioned before that I have moved nearly all of my life. There are people who have known others their entire life. I can’t say this about myself. However, the older I get and the more years I accumulate, this familiarity is becoming more near to me.

I am and have been enjoying my life out west. I have seen things I never would have the chance had we not moved there. And my relationship with Toby has solidified as well. Even if I fail miserably out there, some things are making sense. So maybe it was necessary TO fail. And I’m o.k. with that. I’m not even sure I should call it failure.

Life is not bad, it’s not bad at all. Life is starting to make a little more sense to me now.