Longer post planned for later today, but in the meantime, let us mourn the passing of an era. I just dropped Sonali and Kaen off at the airport. There were hugs and tears, and a certain degree of awe at the sheer amount of stuff I was able to pack into my Sentra.

Some friends and I who happen to be rather close to our roommates have taken to calling them our platonic life partners. Since I'm about to move in with a good friend of mine from grad school, she and Sonali have had discussions regarding what exactly is entailed in transferring life partner duties. They both deny that the phrase "You'll take the brunt of the cuddling now" was ever uttered, but I know what I heard.

The basic truth of the choices I've made and the people I tend to click with is that we will inevitably all move intolerably far away from each other. For now it remains steady at California, Baghdad, and Bangkok, but there's reason to suspect New York, Boston, South America, Great Britain, Switzerland, and Germany are all going to enter the equation within the next five years. As Bryce was kind enough to point out, adulthood means that your close friends are the people you see once a year and your best friends are the people you see twice a year.