Well the end has come for this friendship group, I see, and I never felt it so acutely as today. They all went away for the weekend, and it wasn't so much as I wasn't invited as I'd declined my invitation in advance. I suppose I lost it all in the divorce - or at least the rest of it, since it was fragmenting to begin with. But you know, there are the beginnings and the ends of things, and even when you're blinking into headlights, the collision still hurts.

We'd had good times, all of us. But first I'd left, and then I was gone, and then other people made various decisions that made ... well anyway. The matter of fact is that our heyday is over. And, you know, I never thought how much I depended on these friends, but loss makes need more evident. And now I need to start over again. To build another friendship group from the ground up, instead of simply being absorbed into another. Everyone else is doing this, too. And in a way, this is necessary. Because we're all going different ways, in a couple of months, and there will be a reshuffle. For me, this is sooner, rather than later.

It's strange to be so acutely lonely - I correct myself - not lonely, per se, but I don't know, alone? It's the end of 'my people'. This is, clearly, not incurable. And one moves on.

I can hang out with people I like, still. And, quite frankly, I never was the cool kid!

Yes, I do refer to it as "the divorce", for was it not? The tree may have died but it was still intertwined, and for a very long time, too. Unfortunately, the sad lack of any sort of gravitational pull, which I fully expected, was conspicuously absent - evidence for having done The Right Thing. And I'm sure there are some sideways glances going on as to the speed of which things have moved on, but I assure that all was proper, and after all, you can disguise death for a while (assisted ventilation, anyone?).

As Phil explained it to someone who asked, "I met her at Tom's birthday party three years ago, and she was not single. I met her again a couple of months ago, and she was."

There you go.