it's been a year

It's been a year, and I keep thinking that I've almost forgotten. Clearly I haven't though. Every now and then the pieces keep coming back. With 5 days left until the completion of this degree, I'm thinking back to the beginning of this degree, the moment when I was on the brink of tears, trying to figure out whether or not I could leave everything behind and go to school in a new country. It was 5 in the morning, sitting in his car, my hand in his, my clipboard of pros and cons splayed across my lap, hysterically listing off numbers, figures, locations, monthly grocery budgets. He told me to put the lists away and quietly said, "it's what you wanted all along. It was very obvious to me from the start, I don't understand why it took you so long to see that." We stayed out all night for countless nights that summer, counting cricket chirps in the car, spying on the neighbours from our quiet sanctuary, talking, laughing, doing what ever young lovers high off a summer romance like to do. It lasts through phone calls, of quiet, subtle reminders, nervous glances, comfortable familiarity. It ends when you wake up in the morning and it's time to go - the spell's been broken, because we all know what it feels like, there are those hours in the dead of the night when it chokes you, this lingering, briefly nostalgic, chilling desparate feeling of intimacy. Whether real or imagined, whether you hold it in your arms or you dream of it, in those brief hours in the dead of the night, they become a reality for you. But as you look over to the figure sleeping beside you in the morning light, all of the imagined intimacy fades, all you can hear is good bye, farewell - a long time ago, we used to be friends.