It had been eighteen months since Paris. Eighteen months since Alexander had pushed me away. Eighteen months since I got on a flight and decided to figure out who I really was and what I wanted out of life. Largely, apart from a constant low-level heartache, they had been good months, filled with good things. The campus quad was perfectly silent tonight as I crossed it on my walk back to my condo. The fall semester had just finished up and most students had packed up and headed home for the holidays. The air was crisp, but winters in San Francisco were mercifully mild, a sharp contrast to the snow-filled winters of my childhood. “What are you going to do for Christmas?” my friend Penny had asked me earlier in the day. “Do you want to come over for dinner with my family? They’ll drive you crazy.” She grinned. “Mostly in a good way.” Tom had laughed. In a sea of eighteen-year old undergraduates, the four of us - Tom, Penny, Amy and I - were the token mature students.
