All last week, I kept meaning to write about my most recent trip to Atlanta- about my trips to Atlanta in general, actually, because the several I've taken this summer have all been just painfully, ridiculously wonderful.

I have almost instantly become re-entangled in the group of people I knew all through high school. It started with me finding Meg's Facebook, of all things. And then a month after the initial, "What are you up to these days?" email I was at Meg's son's birthday party, posing with the girls I met a decade ago. We were taking pictures and someone proposed a reunion photo of these women, who all grew up together, who- excepting me- have known one another since preschool. I grabbed the camera, and it was taken from me and handed to Alexis' boyfriend instead; I was grabbed into the circle.

Before Decatur, I didn't ever know anyone for more than a couple of years before we moved again. I had a sort-of hometown in Asheville, but since we never actually lived in the city (my grandparents did, but my immediate family shuffled around between outlying towns) it doesn't feel quite right as such. I belong to Asheville and to Max Meadows, but they never belonged to me.

Neither did Decatur, though, for the longest time. It was, and is, a place where entire childhoods are spent, without the somewhat transient feel of the suburbs and college town and Asheville-outliers where we lived before. It is an intentional place, a town where people move in for the long haul. It was an enormous stroke of luck, and of my parents' good intentions, that we ended up there.

As Meg and I discussed recently, though, no one is really happy in high school- no one I've met, anyway. It's hard at the time to distinguish what of that is situational, or geographical, and what is just the universal malaise of Being In High School. I was not an overly happy teenager, in many ways, but I was happier and busier and of more use in Decatur and Atlanta than I think I would have been almost anywhere else. Vox and Charis Books and Youthpride and Decatur High School took my unfocused, desperately unhappy 13-year-old self and made me DO things, put me among other smart and interesting people in a school where I wouldn't be abjectly miserable after coming out in 8th grade, and gave me three years of being not only in one place, one school, but in the RIGHT place.

But hardly anyone loves where they go to high school, and by the time I left for Hampshire I was sure I would never return. Atlanta was too flat, too hot, too southern; Decatur too self-satisfied and close-knit. I knew I would miss it, but left happily. I visited occasionally, staying with one friend or another, never feeling compelled to stay.

Then I was three years out of college, suddenly. I am living a very different life than the one I imagined for myself in college; in most ways, one more suited to me and less designed around other people's plans (see also: benefits of not dating anyone for years on end.) Also, I'm living the day-to-day life of one concerned with the world of small children. Suddenly the eventuality of having my own kids doesn't seem that far off, and moreover, I don't WANT it to be that far off. I'm making my choices about where to move with a deliberate eye to staying there, to having it be The Eventual Babies' home; as well as how happy any given place will make me right now.

And then there I was, visiting my once-and-current friend, Meg, and being hit like a ton of bricks with the realization that if I can't ever be from Decatur, I want my children to be. That now, finally, a decade on, I am no longer the new kid there- that my friends, among those they've known all their lives, want me in the picture. That these are the people I want as friend-family, now and indefinitely.

It's lovely to belong to somewhere, to a place that can belong to me. It's amazing to feel strongly that I might stay someplace forever. It's also symptomatic of every capital-I Issue I have that this is so important to me, but nothing makes me happier and more comfortable than permanence. And there's finally someplace that I want to be permanent.