June 1, 2017:
I looked at it with Street View. Groves, buildings I don't remember, then the parking lot where the rich Iranians parked their Trans Ams, where my mother parked her old yellow Chevy Nova filled with my world of the time: some clothes, some books: that's really about it.
I lived, I think, in three different rooms on two floors. Had sex in several others and on the roof. Had friends everywhere. Wrote thousands of pages of journals I've subsequently burned.
Why did life feel so vibrant in that moment?
I think, because it was the first freedom of leaving home, in comradeship with very smart people of similar makeup, all of us rejects or rebels from conventional factory schools. It was the epiphany of reading, of discovering my intellect, of discovering whole continents of knowledge I'd never suspected. It was the relaxed understanding that I was never particularly accountable for anything, so long as my tuition was paid. It was sex and love and being not-quite-yet grownup, not in the dead-end way forced by careers and families and roofs overhead.
I never dream of being there. Not ever. I dream of the childhood apartment I left to go there. Does that mean that I wish for childhood? — or that I feel I completed the university phase of my life, but not the phases before or after? Perhaps, more aptly, that I never lived school as my home. It was always only ever a way station. There was no possible confusion over that.
I wouldn't go there again. Except obviously I would. I just did, via Street View. That's enough for now.