You know you're getting old when you start getting this sentimental.

It’s so strange for me to think of myself as being almost twenty. At the end of this short year, I will have crossed the boundary into the latter half of my undergraduate career. (Let’s not think about how many years of schooling I’ll have after that…)

I’m sure many of you are going through similar thought processes. This year when I came home for Thanksgiving, all but a handful of my friends were in college already. I’m thinking specifically of the big Chinese Thanksgiving gathering that always marks the beginning of the holiday season for me—the boys who seem like my older brothers and especially the girls I love as my sisters. When did we all get so old? I’ll always think of this motley crew as forever in high school, forever taking endless piano lessons and playing tennis and taking art and whatever the hell we did to fill those Ohio days. Now, we’re spread all over the country, owning our own businesses, getting married—but it comforts me to know that we’ll always have our time together, and we regroup it’s almost as if nothing has changed.

The same goes for my friends from high school. In many ways, we have grown apart. Instead of spending eight hours a day together, we spend maybe fifteen hours a year in each other’s company, which makes the time we have together all the more precious. We’re not in the same classes, and increasingly, we don’t interact with the same people. All of this is frightening, but at the same time, comforting—because I can spend almost an entire year away from these people and yet still go to their houses and feel home again. We can still while away the long hours of a snowy Ohio evening just talking.

I told myself that I wouldn’t use this to ramble endlessly about myself, which is the blogger’s tired, clichéd trap, but I just had to say something about the feeling of love that overwhelmed me tonight. I wonder if people ever know how much they mean to others? As I sit at home watching the silence settle over my neighborhood, I feel so grateful for all that I have—all the wonderful people who make up my life and all the wonderful people who have yet to enter it.