“…places do not have single, unique ‘identities’; they are full of internal conflicts.”
-Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place”

                These days, my work desk is also our breakfast table, the one I share with my partner and plates of eggs and afternoon board games with friends. In the last few weeks I started thinking it was hard having one place that played all these roles at once. Sometimes I’d go to set down my books and my laptop, and find last night’s dinner plates. But then I started thinking about Massey, and about going back to Amherst College.
                The last time I went to Amherst I was lonely. Most of my friends had graduated. All the little groups on the quad weren’t groups I knew how to join. At the time I remember thinking, “this isn’t home anymore.” Reading Massey, I start thinking instead how Amherst always was and wasn’t home. Or how calling somewhere “home” doesn’t cover up the connection and loneliness that both live there. Since graduating I’ve talked with lots of people about our time —some experiences like mine, and some so different—and those conversations lead off into so many ways that belonging and how one belongs is threaded through with questions of class, race, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and so much more. Amherst College was never one thing. 
                Sitting at my breakfast table, I think about ideas of “knowledge” that position it in the library—and away from the kitchen, the mess of last night’s dinner and the making of this morning’s breakfast. I think about the expectation that where I work and where I cook and eat with my partner should be separate places. I think about my internalized expectations of productivity, responsibility, and success, and how those interact with my internalized ideas of joy, connection, community, rest. Scrambled eggs. I don’t think I’m struggling with one place that is all this. I’m struggling with how all this is “supposed to be” separated out, arranged neatly, and how this separating out, this weighing, is often in the service of creating a hierarchy. An ordering of importance, and time. “I’ll cook when I’m done writing,” I often tell myself. And places are many things at once. Today I think and yawn and stretch while cooking my partner breakfast. It feels strange to call this place “mine.”