This is the place

A scene from home flitted back into my consciousness just now. It was just a moment in time, frozen: a leaping, dancing bonfire that delighted in singeing our eyebrows while our backsides froze in the wintry air. We chatted, we roasted hotdogs and made endless bad bun-puns, ran back to the house occasionally to procure a missing condiment, generally had a nice outdoorsy time. Charlie played guitar in the background, trying (I later found out) to induce a singalong, with mixed results. But I remember a few minutes when the music entranced us and we all stood, shoulder to shoulder in front of the dancing flames, and closed our eyes and sang:

This is the place where I am most wanted
Where everything I am comes from

I'm fairly in touch with my emotions... and, um, so is everyone around me. I'm maybe not so subtle. (I am, however, complicated, as no fewer than three people have reminded me in as many weeks.) Feelings are often intense for me. Where others are pleased, I'm elated, where some are disappointed, I might be crushed. I'm not aiming for the melodramatic, but as I subconsciously measure myself against the others, I do get the feeling that sometimes I'm just a little too much. That I might always stick out a little, no matter how much I want to fade into the background at times.

It was one of those moments that was ultimately real for me: I wasn't making plans or reminiscing or regretting or hoping, I was simply being and listening and breathing and letting life come at me at its own pace, with its own integrity, in its own words. I looked around at the other faces, intense in their own thoughts - friends of years, months, days or mere hours. And somehow I felt I belonged, that there was room for me in this circle.

This is the place where I am most wanted
Where everything I am comes from

I want to go home.