Our weekend was really nice. It started with a lazy Friday night at home. My parents had gone to visit my brother at school, so Rob and I sat on the back porch with my dog and drank red wine, snacking on sweet potato chips and goat cheese spread onto thick slices of salami.

After a morning of coffee and eggs, we got in the car to visit Sean on our way to northern Virginia. We stopped for lunch in Farmville and I had a Bloody Mary and some wings before getting back in the car to go to Rob's brother Dan's house.

And then we woke up on Sunday and it rained. I drank coffee on the couch, snuggled under Rob's arm as we watched previous episodes of Girls and then a documentary by Stephen Hawking. Blanket, boyfriend, a cool rainy morning--that's my kind of Sunday.

When we got to the hotel where Rob will be living for the next month and a half, I felt overwhelmed. The place is beautiful and cozy, and I did not want to drive four hours into the evening without him. But we've done this before, and we talk all the time, and I'll see him on Friday.

But damn it if I don't miss that guy already.

Happy birthday to the man that I love so much, the guy who makes me laugh and is there for me when I cry, who believes in me and supports me no matter what bizarre idea I've managed to come up with, and who simply enough just gets me.

I am so thankful for the handful of birthdays we've spent together. Here's to many, many more!

Happy birthday, Rob. I love you.

(Send him a birthday tweet!)

I never really got attached to Charlottesville because, while here, I constantly reminded myself that it was simply a temporary home for us. It was just another stop on our nomadic path to a one-day life of permanent, domestic bliss. Stay a year, move along.

So, when people were snobby or things didn't go smoothly for me, I said, "Whatever, that's just Charlottesville." The restaurants were good. It was nice to be able to walk wherever I wanted. But it never felt like the city in which I lived. Rob was a student, and I was almost a tourist; his live-in girlfriend, along for the ride.

I surprised myself on Thursday when I started feeling sad on my walk to get some coffee. Rob and I were only in town long enough to spend the night, pack a few things, and get brunch with some friends before heading to DC. It was early and it had rained all night, so the ground was damp and the air was cool. I would miss this place, I realized. I walked out the door and took a few steps before turning back for a scarf. The streets were quiet. The walk from apartment to coffee shop felt final.

I love Charlottesville, and I love my friends here, but I hadn't planned to feel bad about moving away.

I got to Para and ordered a latte, chatted with the barista, and took a seat at the bar to write a couple things down in a notebook. "Alright," I thought a few minutes later, "time for me to get back home." Home. I use the word loosely, and then I confuse myself with my many homes.

I walked back to the apartment, feeling a little down. There were things to pack, and the weekend would begin with Rob catching a flight to the other side of the world. But then I walked into our bedroom and crawled into the familiar arms of my still sleeping and scruffy-faced boyriend, and I felt at home, realizing that the great restaurants and that library and the coffee shop with homemade pistachio milk certainly help, but in the end, it doesn't matter if it's Charlottesville or Charlotte or Roanoke or China, because home is about who you find when you get there.