dinner dates, roommates...

Brandishing a bunch of red romunculi (a congratulatory gesture for launching this blog, finally), Meg showed up right on Jess and David's heels. Still adjusting to this new kitchen, and my new housemates, but if anything's going to shorten the distance between all of us, it's a dinner date.

Cooking together, eating together--we've done it enough times for it to feel unexceptional. But I have a fascination with the fact that it's a rite we carried from our families into college, and from college into our lives now, our City lives, where we make comfort anywhere we can get it. Our time, our energy to reach outward to our families, our far-flung friends--it's dwindling. We approximate home with those closest to us.

And this is ultimately what we do for one another: we read articles aloud, chop fennel for large, shared salads. We brew the coffee, set the morning alarm. We send one another out the door, we wish one another good days, or good nights, and we mean it. But we cannot follow one another to work, we can’t take on each other’s troubles to ease them (even though we listen tirelessly to the sadness that never quite seems to go away).

This is why, despite our convincing re-creation of a family, it’s impossible to make it true: we can only read so many articles, pour so many cups of tea, before we’re out the door, back out into the night. Alone, again, taking the long, quiet trip back to our dark, empty rooms. We produce our own keys, we turn on the hall light.