You know, growing old sucks.

[Ooooh, profundity today, Geof.]

No, really, it does.

I sit here, a semester from being done with my engineering degree at UAH. It’s not what I really want, but it’s what I’m getting. So like life, isn’t it? This is what I wanted for so long, and now that I’m almost there, it’s like, “Dude, this is it?”

So you have to ask yourself–what the hell is important in this world? It’s certainly not a job. A job is just that–a place to go to transfer money from your customer’s bank accounts into your employer’s, and oh, by the way, getting a little trickle of it yourself. That’s just one huge game … a job.

Now, a vocation, well, that’s something different. I’ve got my vocation … I just haven’t gotten very far down the road with it.

But then you start to think … is it education? Well, here I sit, a wizened would-be aerospace engineer, and do I feel that much smarter? Nope. Do people think of me differently? Well, yeah. I tell people not from Huntsville what I’m majoring in, and they’re like, “Cool!” Around Huntsville, it’s about as common as a cold.

Education, just like a job, is a means to an end.

When I lie awake at night, I realize what’s most important to me in this life are relationships. Relationships with family, with friends, with my God. Relationships I’ve worked hard to build, relationships I’ve willingly, devastatingly, and disappointingly destroyed.

Two of my friends are leaving now: Jessica and Heather. [God, I get choked up just writing that and reading it again. May no one walk into my office right now, eh?]

Heather wrote about she and Jess joking about “getting a divorce”. It’s like that, really … you’re making a break. In some ways, unfortunately, my divorce with those two happened long ago … slowly, without really noticing.

I lived in the dorm with Jess and Heather for both years. When we moved out, we both ended up in the same apartment complex … in the same *building*. I helped them move as best as I could, as I did lots of folks then. I even remember the fun trip to Bowling Green, KY, to take Jessica to visit her aunt and get a frame for a queen-sized bed of her very own. [Hell, on that trip back, I finally got it through my thick freakin' skull that Jess and I would never be more than friends. God love Jess for being that patient with me. :)]

You’d think that living in the same apartment building would have kept us together. It didn’t, and I can’t really explain why. You’d think that proximity would have done something for that, but for whatever reason, it didn’t. I felt it happening, but you know, I didn’t work to try to stop it. Oh, sure, we still did stuff now and again, but … it wasn’t the same.

You never realize how much energy you put into a relationship until it’s faded or ebbed, when you’re spent and left holding an empty jar where seemingly boundless energy once sprung forth from your hand. I want to blame me for it, and I want to blame them … and I don’t know that blame’s approrpriate at all.

Over the last year, since I’ve gotten to know Katharine and Sean and Amy and Jeff, I’ve come back into Heather and Jess’s lives again. Heather, of course, had to start calling me “Gee-off”, partly because she knows it bothers me [and she finds that funny, and hell, I do, too, most days], and partly to keep the confusion level with Jeff down. I have felt … part of their lives … again.

But all is not perfect, and it never was, really. Only in recollection are relationships perfect, in that idyllic frame in which our memories place them, like so many senior class photos retouched to remove the acne of adolescence.

I’ll see them again tonight, but probably not many times more. Heather leaves Sunday; Jess will be in and out until a little after the first of the year, and then she, too, will be gone from physical proximity.

And that just makes me tear up all over again. Damn allergies. *heh*

Well, ladies, this is going to be the only way I can ever say this to either of you, but I love you and will miss you when you are gone. I will visit you and welcome you back to my home anytime, but we both know that we’re leaving little bits of ourself here as we go forward. But when I see you tonight, I’ll probably hold on to that hug just a little longer.

And, for once, I’ll probably be speechless.