A place where my insatiable need for information and answers, now now NOW! is fed, sometimes more than it should be, sometimes with things I’d never dream I’d get to learn, and sometimes with the intellectual equivalent of Twinkies and a Big Gulp.

A place where my new baby niece is growing up before my eyes, though sadly not in my arms. But I wouldn’t trade that glimpse for anything.

A place where I’ve found every job I’ve had for almost a decade, where I find clients, where I find new challenges, and where I self-train on skills for the next round of all three.

A place where I develop strange expectations for what I should have or where I should go or what I need because look! That person has it right there. Some of them I shake off, some I don’t.

A place where I meet new friends, some of whom are kindred and some of whom have patience that I exceed over time or vice versa, though I want to punch myself in the eye when I’m that easily tired of another person.

A place where rumors and hearsay become “truth” in a shorter time than it took our great-great-great grandmothers to tell a story by the fire.

A place where, in ten seconds or less, I can find a picture of a Blue Meanie or a red wagon or a Green Lantern or a Purple Heart or a pink Cadillac or a Clockwork Orange or yellow snow (no!)

A place where people I used to know pop up like Cirque du Soleil performers when I least expect them, though with more clothing and less pizazz.

A place where there are so many pandas, you’ll never see them all.

A place where insecurity is a boomerang. A sharp one. With spikes. And a squirt gun filled with lemon juice.

A place where we get to choose what we take in and what we consume… but where the relationships we build often break that filter down to a hole the size of the Grand Canyon. I wouldn’t have sought that out, but you love it and I love you, so wow. Look at that.

A place where someone will tell me why my arm is hurting or what that red spot is or why I have a strange ache behind my eye but the answers are so horrifying that I force myself to stop wondering.

A place where I watch people establish themselves and then contradict themselves and then contradict themselves again and it doesn’t matter because I’m sure I do it, too.

A place where my insomnia finds solace? Root? Fuel? Kindred spirits? Mostly, it’s there when I can’t sleep.

A place where faceless and sometimes-faced people shift from observers to commenters to encouragers to critics in the blink of an eye, and sometimes multiple times in a day.

A place where there are 10,000 different potential sets of white sheets to buy.

A place where mothers talk to mothers and fathers talk to fathers and people who love the movies of John Waters send awkward GIFs to one another and girls who don’t like their bodies find girls who don’t either and people with quirks and kinks and needs and wants and sometimes FBI files find everyone else and peer salaciously at them behind screen names with inscrutable numbers.

A place where I learn things about people by observing, and test them by interacting, and where my theses are right about 75% of the time from there. But man, the 25% I’m wrong? Damn.

A place where I will cry at pictures of baby animals because of course, why wouldn’t a baby hedgehog need me as a mom?

A place where I could say I was broke and that I’d found out I was both sick and infertile and where I could announce new jobs and put up photos of new apartments and new cities and feel at once accepted and understood and yet keep everyone at arm’s length, if that’s what I needed.

A place where I redact some of my most fiery opinions and let others fly, according to a code that I can’t quite articulate, but seems clear in my head.

A place where people lecture me about how I see the world… even though the lecture is just how they see the world, but they don’t know how to not position it as an oppositional entity.

A place where there are other people who love coffee and Sephora and beaches and a well-seared scallop and handbags as big as their heads, and where we can could prattle about those things with only a bit of derision from others (mostly, they just ignore us.)

A place where my relatives found me at a slight delay to my own presence in different quarters, and where I learned that my desire to say whatever the hell I wanted did actually fall a distant second to not hurting my parents’ feelings.

A place where I can ask an endless amount of questions and receive back an endless amount of answers, though I get one question in return more often than not, “Why do you care?”

A place where I care, but the why changes all the time.

A place where there are many fish in the sea but also a ton of hooks… and sometimes nets and spears and traps and outboard motors and oil spills and tourists with snorkels swimming through your school.

A place where I fell in love with a handsome, says-I-love-you-every-day, hilarious man who eats my cooking almost unreservedly and lets me keep the bedroom window wide open and who lets me spaz out about Christmas and the occasional pop song and lip gloss if I need to or want to or can’t help myself.

A place where I don’t know what I’ll get any given day, but where I choose to carry it with me or not.

A place where you found me. But how you feel about that, I don’t know.

A place where there’s a 50% chance you’ll tell me.