My friends are all slowly departing, and I find myself confronted with that old familiar sadness I have felt many times before at the end of a good thing.
I felt it when I left highschool and I left them all behind in Wellington to go to university.
I felt it at the departure of my flatmates from Dunedin at the end of our degrees.
I felt it (possibly most prominently) at the end of my first spectacular summer in Canberra, where I had formed an intense new set of friends, and we had to go our separate ways again so soon.
I will no doubt feel it again at the end of this year when I graduate med school and all my friends spread across the world for work.
Some times I think that people in villages in the middle ages must have lived significantly happier lives, because while their lives were significantly harder, and filled with real dangers and hardships, they grew up with, worked with, lived with and died with all their friends and family (love ’em or hate ’em) near by and geographically unchanging. What I wouldn’t do to have all my friends in close proximity so I didn’t have to say goodbye to them for such long periods at a time. It always leaves me feeling deeply saddened and a little poorer each time we part.