I’m sitting on the porch of my new home in Arlington, Virginia. That I instinctually write “home” instead of “house,” or “place,” or “apartment” is a good sign. Driving down here today, moving boxes and setting up, I felt purposeful and deliberate, as though I was moving through time. This is important. My girlfriend has talked to me a lot about how moving through time is preferable to feeling as though time is moving through you.

II.

It is my first night here. Except, it isn’t. I used to rent a room above the garage of the house next door. That was my first place in DC; my starting point when I began work at Gartner in August of 2019. In February, I moved to be closer to work. Then the pandemic happened and I moved away because I didn’t need to be close to work. Now I’m back in the same place where I began my life-after-college, plus or minus fifty feet.

III.

For me, there’s something contemplative about the first night of a commitment that lulls me into thinking about the first nights of past commitments.

For instance, I remember laying in bed a year ago after my dad left and listening to the crickets chirping and thinking the outside sounded very big and that I was very small by comparison. I had my first day of my first real job in the morning. And I remember being afraid and uncomfortable and unsure of why I felt this way seeing as I had slept under many strange roofs during my summer in Europe. I was happy when the morning came.

So, too, do I remember the first night I spent in my next apartment: A studio in an old high-rise with forced air and a wide floor-to-ceiling window that let in good natural light and the sounds of the world outside, mainly traffic. I remember it being a cold February night and FaceTiming my best friend (who is now also my girlfriend) for hours that slipped passed like water through my fingers and being too tired to feel anything else but simple abiding joy around 4am when I fell asleep.

My first night back in Philadelphia was in late May. My parents had moved to this house shortly before I went to college and they subsequently got divorced. It was strange and a little stupefying to lay in a too-short bed in a room that wasn’t quite mine and to think that I was here again. But then again, it was also May and the world was a different place than it had been February or August. In the moment, I thought less about that first night and worried more about what the nights thereafter would be like.

In July, I returned to my high-rise apartment in Arlington to move out. The first night back felt like the one and only push needed to start a car rolling downhill, and I mean that in the best way possible. Rarely during the pandemic had I felt the familiar confines of a real and major personal deadline—work deadlines often felt arbitrary and were never personal—and to feel such a deadline motivated me.

Then I came back to Philadelphia for six weeks. It was August. My dad had moved to Chicago and I was the only one in the house. Living through such an interlude as a caretaker of another person’s belongings made me feel as though I was, as Proust described, “reliving a past which was no longer anything more than the history of another person.”

For me, returning to Arlington is, among many things, a reunion.

IV.

I have long been fascinated with reunions—the act of going away and returning to a place—because reunions exist at the intersection of perceptions of space and time. Some reunions are accompanied by a “never having taken place feeling,” as if the going away was an interlude outside your actual, dominant timeline, a fun bit-part you got to play before getting on with the main act. If the main act is not something you would willingly choose for yourself, it can feel like time is moving through you.

But to return to any place is to return changed, which means all reunions are defined at least in part by the differences between before and after. In this way, reunions are as much about the destination (the place) as they are about the journey (the time). To notice the differences—to see them standing out against the old, familiar background—is to feel like you are moving through time.

In part, I think this is what Tennessee Williams meant when he wrote “time is the longest distance between two places.” In a sense, he was describing the year it took me to move the fifty feet from next door to where I am sitting now.

Earlier today, I went for a run from my house. I passed the same squat motel on the corner with the red roof and my favorite cafe down the block and a friend who shouted my name from across the street. It was as if no time had passed, and yet, time had passed. I was different—calmer, more level-headed, passionate still but differently passionate, and the changes stood out more against the old, familiar background. My hair was also longer.

As I ran, I felt lighter and lighter, until, after about a mile, I felt like I could view my soul from outside my body, experiencing my present as much as I was reliving my memory—running down Custis along the same route I used to run to work; across the Key Bridge as I had done so many times before; through Georgetown where I had lingered on many Sunday afternoons window shopping, chatting, living in and out of cafes and existing on park benches. I ran a few laps around the track where I had pushed my body to the verge of literal harm and built it back up from injury. I ran further still, up the hill and past the dog park and into the woods where I’d spent many mornings running with other guys through fog that burned off like sleep leaving sunshine and banter for the second half of a downhill ten-mile loop we completed dutifully before work. This reminded me that chasing a dream rarely looks sexy; more often, it is a ten-mile loop completed dutifully before work.

I emerged from the woods and ran back across the Key Bridge, fluvial wind buffeting my skin. My body felt smooth and effortless as I clipped off six-minute miles. I was running shirtless during the warmest part of a cool September day. There are many sensations that describe what it feels like to be young, and this is one of them.