The Naming of Things

Sometimes you know a place exists, but you have no actual reference for it. Like places far away, or like how when you are a kid you don't understand how other people DON'T live in your hometown. What? People actually live in New Hampshire? This concept of living in other places still perplexes me sometimes. I don't understand how other people live in places I have never been.

Right now, though, I am thinking about places I have been and seen and lived, and I kind of just hope that they are real. I hope that Oxford is real. Sometimes I don't even think it actually exists as a place; it's like Narnia or something. I mean, Anna Popplewell DOES live there...but if Prince Caspian lived there...SWOON.

Uh, where was I?

Oh yeah. I have been feeling very nostalgic for England lately. Part of that is that I didn't live there long enough to become cynical. Whenever I start to romanticize about the way I lived there, I have to stop and remind myself how hard it was. I don't feel like I can express to anyone how hard it really was. For myself, I am not sure that I grasp the difficulty of it, what I put myself through. Not that it was an ordeal, but sometimes I felt like I was making so many wrong choices about what to say or do or write. I can think of a MILLION ways to go back again and do it better. But beyond that, I miss the place a ton. What is more than the place, though I think that it is a place that loves you back, is the people. Oxford was so incredible because I had incredible people by my side through every essay, every bout of homesickness, every time silliness overtook me and I couldn't help but jump around singing Mika incessantly. Or Madonna. Or Avril Lavigne. What?

I am still having the withdrawal symptoms from being removed from those relationships. Coming home and picking up my former friendships has been wonderful, but I still desire that day-to-day life that I had with the Crick Road housemates.

I don't understand how anyone could live in 8 Crick Road apart from the group of people that I knew there. It's the opposite of what I thought as a kid, kind of. Maybe not quite exactly the opposite. But it's different. Now I can't comprehend anyone but only a certain 26 people living in that house.

But I guess really it is the same - only what I myself know is real. The Oxford I didn't know is not real. The places that I have never been, that I do not know, are not real.

blah blah blah. okay i don't know what i am talking about anymore.

'hey erin, you should keep talking'. hm, that might be my signal to shut up, say my prayers, and go to sleeeeeeeeeeep.