I found this saved as a draft from August, and most of it still rings true five months later:

Yesterday I helped Gina move. By that I mean I showed up when one big load had already gone, and when she had help more coordinated and enthusiastic than I was, so I ended up carrying a few things and then wandering through the emptying rooms of her apartment.

I've been thinking about endings, as one tends to do during periods of transition. I take endings seriously. I mourn them, even if the thing ending is one I'm happy to put in the past. Ending grad school has been a particularly difficult one for me. From the beginning, I looked at grad school as something I was fortunate enough to do, an extended vacation from the responsible, reasonable parts of my life. I was granted two years in which to read and write and bum around bars with my friends talking about what we'd recently read and written. Even on the most stressful days, I felt so lucky to be doing that instead of anything else in the world.

And now it's over. It's done, and so much sooner than I thought it would be. It didn't feel real over this summer. Only now, only with everyone starting to move and finding jobs and progressing with their lives, can I feel the reverberation of ending. I feel like an empty apartment, one that still echoes with the parties and the late nights and the snow days and the long talks.

The future is an exciting place, certainly. An exciting, uncertain, totally unmapped place in which my friends, who have structured and sustained all of my days here, are scattered.