I hate moving more than I hate most things. I hate it, despite having made surprisingly few wholesale moves in my life. In 1998, I moved from Lemoyne, PA to Boston; and in 2009, I moved from Boston (okay, Somerville) to Charlottesville. There have been a few other small moves scattered in there. But moving within a city does not entail the level of disruption to one’s life that is incurred by moving across state lines, hundreds of miles, to an entirely new city and place.

No, I’m not moving. But our neighbors are.

It’s a little sad to watch friends prepare to leave. Tomorrow, the moving van will be in place, and then they’ll be gone. What bothers me most, however, is not that friends of mine are leaving. It’s that Nora’s friend is moving. She seems to be taking it fairly well, but I still don’t know how she’ll react when the reality hits her that Ava doesn’t live across the street any more. Even though she knows it’s coming, there’s no knowing how she’ll respond in that moment. I don’t know how she’ll react when the moving van actually drives away. I don’t even know if I want her to be there when it does.

I have this vision of her, watching the van disappear around the corner, standing there for a few seconds, then turning to look at me with tears in her eyes and a trembling lip.

Perhaps I’m over-dramatizing things a tad. But losing a friend sucks, no matter your age.