The distance is a divide that grows in our identities. We value different ideas, different places and different people. By junior year, we are firmly rooted in Harvard community--admittedly an amorphous concept, but the Houses, extracurricular organizations and friends form our spheres of orbit. The time at the Institute of Politics, Holworthy's basement or the Murr Center becomes as much a part of us as anything else. While I once identified myself as a Southern girl, now my family tells my I talk funny (i.e. Northern). And while I harassed my Uncle Louis for yet another silly story, now I do not even attend his funeral.

Yet our whole personalities can never really fit into the four-year box that we are given. Since my great-uncle passed away I realized that I have been speaking with more of a southern twang, as if I'm trying to impress upon my friends that I'm not just here in Cambridge--there is more than meets the eye.

Ultimately, we are only here for four years. Whatever community or identity we form is fluid, pushed out after Commencement and dispersed back across the nation and the world. Granted, we may emerge with a handful of lifelong friends, a rolodex of useful business acquaintances, and maybe--if we are lucky--a partner for life. But the person next door to you in your first year will not, in all likelihood, be the person next door to you in 50 years. Just as we are close together now, the same distance that plagues our families will someday plague our relations with one another.

So I write a card to my great aunt, a column to my friends, and try to do by proxy the duty that distance prohibits me from doing in person.

Erin B. Ashwell '02 is a government concentrator in Eliot House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.