“Or, if you want, there’s always a place for you here with me.”
                -Jasmine Walls, Brooms (p. 230)

                I’ve been thinking lately about how so many of the places where I’m at home and feel connected, feel able to help—so many of those places are actually people.
                I’ve moved a fair amount in the last fifteen years. Massachusetts to California to Andhra Pradesh to a different part of California to Oklahoma to Illinois. And while I’ve largely stayed here since 2019, I’ve also moved six times inside Illinois. That doesn’t count the trips to visit folks elsewhere. If I look at any place, if I look at how I was and who I was in a place, what I find is people. My friend Krishna in Andhra Pradesh, the two of us at a table supposedly playing chess but moving more thoughts and smiles than pieces. The rabbits who nested near my front door my first year in Oklahoma. My friend Fin in Illinois, the two of us lying beneath the trees and talking. And on and on: there are so many friends to remember, so many people making a place for me with them.
                When I started working on this post, I was focused on how people become the “where” of my life. But as I sit with this, revising it—that’s one of the wonders of revising: sitting with words like muddy waters, as the clay settles, as I see another shape in the slow current—I’m also thinking about how wheres grow the communities who become my life. Fin and I became connected while watching the trees together. More than anything else, the rabbits and I shared grass, its a green delight. Krishna and I became friends in the shade that dappled our table. So I’m focused less, now, on how one leads into the other, and more on how they blend together: how here and us can weave together so there’s always a place for me with you. For you with me.