What I’m coming to realize is that the places you don’t walk away from in this life won’t take the shape of office buildings or your first grown-up apartment in [Long Island City/Bushwick/Hoboken]. They won’t be fabricated of glass and concrete, and they won’t have a zip code attached. They’ll be those edgeless institutions unbeholden to geography: unconditional friendship, the safety of conversation, and the places that feel like home — genuinely, and not in some socially constructed way — even if they are 3,000 miles from where you were born and raised. They’ll be the places where your dreams have been alternately incubated, dashed, and brought to life again. The places that stay under your skin and under your fingernails. They’ll be the places that — even if you do stray for a while — will be right there where you left them, waiting for you when you’re ready to take your life back.

Eliot Rose, I’m not sure who you are, but this was the best thing I read today.