Oldies!

Woah.

The feeling of separation that hits you when the oldies leaves hurts more the second year.

I imagine it's probably because I only spent about two months with the other oldies, and I spent a year and two months with these guys.

The first day that the oldies weren't around, the house felt absurdly empty. During a bit of free time that day and during Holy Hour, I wrote down some things. Reading over them again, those things are not particularly positive. I think it reflects how overwhelmed I felt in the moment, both imagining what it would look like for the eleven people who stayed here to suddenly be doing all of the work when nine people got into the car and left, and imagining what it would be like to not have those people around for the times when you have questions about how to manage your new job, when you want to be able to turn to another person and say, "I'm not being crazy, right? That's a weird thing that our community does!", when you want somebody else to agree to participate in an event you'd like to organize, when you want enough people at holy hour to hold a tune together, when you need to know how to say a word in Spanish, when you want to play a game of american football, when you want to watch a good movie on [once every two weeks] movie night and everyone else is voting for something silly, when you want to try and steal a chicken from one of the kids on his or her way back from the bodega, or when you want to throw oranges at house two and/or its inhabitants.
Those are times I'm going to miss.

I think those are the moments you carry with you in your head until they fade with time and/or are replaced by the experiences you have with those still around you. Some of those new experiences have already happened, but there are more yet to come. You've just gotta figure out how to pick yourself up back off the ground and keep on keeping on till the memory of those oldies is simply fond, not sad!

We cleaned the house Thursday, and again yesterday, and somebody made the intelligent observation: "We may not be able to help whether or not the oldies left, but we are able to help what our house looks like!" Oddly enough, cleaning the house, for me, fit into that category of new experiences to ease the pain.

Okay, I gotta run, but I'm actually doing fine guys, even if it doesn't sound like it!