intimate strangers

I keep looking for a single story that will distill this weekend's reunion into a cogent thought, and I can't come up with one. There wasn't really any singularly representative moment or anything profound like that, and even the usual cop-out route I take with this stuff -- jamming sixty million snippets of description into one sentence and not explaining any of them -- isn't going to work. Summary: I had a really wonderful time. Chalk another victory up to low expectations, seriously -- it was a hundred times better than I imagined.

And it's not like things were perfect in my life when I lived there, and it's not like they were perfect when I went back this weekend. I'm not whitewashing. But something about being at Wesleyan... it was fun and funny to see the random acquaintences, but my college friends, including and almost especially the ones I don't keep in great touch with and don't really need to, make me feel more like myself than I usually do. They open me somehow. I feel grounded. Safe and whole.

You know what was the craziest part? The way everything smelled. UNBELIEVABLE. I know smell is supposed to be that kind of sense, that puts you right back where you were, but oh my god. The cafeteria, the hallway of my freshman year dorm, the mailroom, the courtyard in front of the COL building, the trees behind the hill in the center of campus. Incredible.

I'm totally blathering now. I didn't get eight hours of sleep if you add Friday and Saturday nights together. I'm going to watch crazy mobsters kill each other and then I'm going to bed. I wonder if some day a long time from now I'll walk into this house and it'll smell the same and I'll feel this way.