But it's just a place...?

I am currently typing on my little sister's new macbook pro whilst sitting in my godmother's front room here in Chicago, IL. This computer is awesome. I think I like their new model better and I'm also quite sure that it will break a lot less often than mine did. That is not the point. I'm being something they call evasive right now.

My godmother lives near North Park, a school I went to for one semester immediately after my Dad died. It was a miserable experience for me but these days I pretty much just make jokes about how awful it was when I'm asked and make sure to emphasize any and every silver lining that I can after I make the jokes. Because I have been using the approach of making light of the situation to deal with it I forgot exactly how horrible it was for me there.

Today we moved my little sister into her dorm at North Park (and, just for the record, I think she'll love this school) and it was surprisingly difficult for me. Last night I was just as excited about moving her in as she was but as we got closer to campus I realized that I was starting to feel sick. A former classmate of mine was helping the freshmen move in and decided to talk to me. In the middle of our conversation he was telling me how he thinks North Park is the only place where you can make this certain kind of lifelong friends. I disagreed but also made the "well not for me!" joke that had to be told. He said that I had at least one, quite obviously suggesting that he was the one friend I derived from my North Park experience, which made me so angry because I rarely spoke to this kid and only hung out with him outside of class once. He was a nobody as far as my time here was concerned and he has not contacted me once since I left. And he is my lifelong North Park friend? I do have friends from North Park that I still talk to, thank you very much. When that conversation was over my sister and I rode up the elevator with all of our things and another former classmate helped carry her mini refrigerator. I very deliberately didn't speak to him and he awkwardly recognized but didn't acknowledge me. But the worst was when I was helping my sister unpack in her dorm and found myself feeling debilitatingly sick. I can't wrap my head around it...

This is my issue: North Park is just a place and it isn't a bad place at that. No one was terrible (or even slightly unkind) to me when I was here. It's just that I was hurting really badly and because of that I couldn't get close to anyone or do well in my classes. How is it than even as I am telling myself that this isn't a bad place, that it's filled with good people and professors and it's relatively pretty to boot, I am still so moved (invisibly) by my experience here that I cannot even spend a significant amount of time on campus without feeling ill or miserable or both? It doesn't make sense. Firstly it bothers me that I don't seem to have control over what I feel. Secondly it bothers me that simply being physically present in a place can make me feel this terrible.

Agh, what is going on?

I think I should probably just never come back here. Ever. :)