Goodbye. Hello. Goodbye. Goodbye.

Last Saturday JD and I gathered together a group of people to celebrate Gilmore's permanent departure from NYC. Seems like Dave had outgrown his current position and had moved on to something more challenging (read: better paying).

I proposed, naturally, some daytime drinking. It had been awhile since I boozed in the sunlight, over two years I guess, and from what I recalled, it was awesome. My recollections were correct. There is nothing like punctuating your beers with an amazing bacon cheeseburger from the 5th Ave Diner, except of course for watching JD pound TWO burgers while you're stealing fries from your roommate's plate.

It was a bittersweet occasion. Gilmore is gone now. Not across the residential mall, like he was in college. Not in the next bedroom, like he was last summer. Not in another borough like he's been for the past year. He's once again back in the colonies, a Chinatown bus trip away. And I'm a little sad, because now the person who wants to do shit like this with me is no longer just a few miles away.

So once again, our BFFship becomes long distance. For my phone bill, this is horrible. For the past 7 years Dave has been the go-to person for all things Nora. When I need a ride back from the airport, Dave will pick me up even though he's sick as a dog, and proceed to vomit fresh orange juice on his shoes while I laugh hysterically in the passenger seat. When I'm ending a relationship and a cohabitation and need a place to go Gilmore is going to carry all of my earthly belongings on his back and give me the biggest room in his apartment, a room of my own. He's going to write me notes in the morning and have coffee on when I wake up. When I'm at the end of my rapidly fraying rope balancing multiple existential crises? I call my mom. And when she doesn't answer, which she never does, I call Gilmore, who will tell me that no, I have not yet lost my mind, I'm just kind of a sonofabitch.

Saturday night, at the same bar where I was throwing Dave's farewell party, I ran into The Old Boyfriend. It had been ten months since I'd seen him, somewhere on 5th Ave after a horribly awkward lunch, when I disappeared into my office building and pressed up up up up up up hoping the extra pushes would not just make the ancient elevator appear faster, but make it shoot through the roof Willy Wonka style, taking me away from the chaos of those overwhelming emotions, to a place where all of the craziness was over. And apparently that did happen, because as we sat and talked for an hour in that Brooklyn bar, I realized that the great glass elevator had taken ten months, but it had worked. I was right where I had wanted to be ten months ago as I stood in the lobby of my office pressing up up up up up and waiting for the pain to pass.

I'd had a dream some months ago that I had run into the old boyfriend, who had unwittingly showed up to my birthday party in an abandoned warehouse, thrown by people I didn't know and attended almost exclusively by strangers. In the dream, he was with a girl, and she wanted to know why things didn't work out. WELL, I started out, IF YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW...and rattled through all of the concrete events that had led to our demise. I practically had a PowerPoint with bullet points and venn diagrams, empirical evidence that the problem was him, not me. Halfway through my righteous, vindictive breakup speech, I caught his eye, and something in his look made me see that I was wrong. It wasn't anything that happened, I corrected myself. It doesn't really matter what happened. We were just two people trying to make something work that wasn't going to. That's all.

I woke up from that dream feeling lighter, like an invisible weight had been lifted from my shoulders. It was nobody's fault. It does no good to blame. Forward, forward, always forward.

Saturday night was like that dream, only on crack. Or, more on crack than my normal dreams, which usually involve some form of espionage and often talking unicorns. Whatever weight that had lingered behind was gone, dissolved by a frantic 45 minutes of catching up, of trading stories back and forth, of filling in the gaps in what we had heard through the grapevine about one another. Look at this, I wanted to say, It was necessary, all of those arguments followed by all of that silence. It was all so we could end up like this: both finally moved on, and talking to each other like people.

So that was Saturday. One David wandered back into my life, and another wandered out. Ohio, Minnesota, Los Angeles, Ohio, London, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Ohio, Italy, Baltimore, New York City and Baltimore again. We end up just where we need to be.