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I had a really great talk with Devon earlier tonight. We haven't seen each other very much this summer, but somehow we always reconnect in the simplest fashion. She leaves for college tomorrow, and as I was driving home, it hit me for the first time: I won't see these people for weeks. Months. Years. The people that I've grown to call my friends, my family, my home, my base - the trust and dreams and experiences we've instilled in each other and encountered with alongside one another - has all that really culminated to this final moment?

So many things. Friendships and relationships and moments and emotions. Eighteen solid years of change and construction, nostalgia as rich as reality itself. People and places and names and long-forgotten sentences and often-repeated stories and instances of hilarity and terror and fear and hope, all running through my mind on a continuous and never-ending loop.

I've said goodbye before. These days, who hasn't? But somehow, this feels deeper. Harder. Rough, like the feeling of sandpaper against skin. Pained, like the sensation of getting the wind knocked out of you. It feels...different.

Of course I'm scared. Hell, I'm terrified. But this is life, and it goes on and on and on and on, and I'm just along for the ride.