It's Wednesday night in the Southern Hemisphere, and it's cold here in Sydney. The cold doesn't sit well with me. Why should it? I haven't truly endured it in at least 5 years, at least not to any long-term degree. The lack of heating systems in this country is something to which I am trying to adapt. I love my new country and I live within the Aussie way of doing things, but adaptation is often a challenge.

My mind keeps tripping back to days that are recent, but seem so far away. On an entirely different continent, I shared parts of my life with you. The threads of our lives wove in and around each other, away from each other, tangling into other threads as well. God only knows how tangled up we got in our own web.

I moved on, I moved away, and you were sad. I was, too, but I had adventures waiting to distract me from your infrequent calls. Really, I just didn't want to think about you anymore. But I did. The thoughts, they came and they went, like waves against a distant shore. I blocked them with any damming material I could find, but the tsunamis continually found their way to my new home along the Southern Coast. In the dark of night, lying beside my sleeping (sometimes snoring) roommates, I'd allow them to crash into me, to overcome me, to drown me. I, the guard of my emotional prisoners, would only allow them into the jail yard for exercise in such darkness. Some of them would sit along the fenced in yard to watch the magnificence of the powerful ocean rolling in under the moonlit skies. They longed for such relation, but understood the helplessness of their own reality.

Time passed by even more quickly than the cities. I celebrated another birthday, another year in a foreign country and somehow felt like I was home. It was a beautiful time spent traveling, despite the exhaustion that resulted. We bid adieu to our triplet and sent him packing, on his way back to the motherland. I was jealous.

The more I talk to you, to best friends at home, the more I realize I voluntarily left a world that I adored (though far too often took for granted.) And when I left, though I was not the ruling monarch of this nation, the world ceased to exist. It died away as if the sun supernovaed, disintegrating the oxygen in our atmosphere.

And the glue which tightly held our friend group together dissolved instantly, leaving a separation that I doubt to be beneficial.

And so it goes, as Vonnegut proclaimed.