Graduated thoughts from the peanut gallery

Well, I guess I've finally done it. After 7 years, a little blood, some amount of sweat and excessive tears, not counting the grey hairs or the character flaws acquired, I'm finally getting out of Case and Cleveland. Graduation was on Sunday, nothing holding me back but the packing and the furniture. It's strange, I must have been here for so long, I feel like I've grown into the place. Don't get me wrong, I by no means want to stay here, but at the same time this is the familiar ground now; this is where I'd spent most of my 20s, met most of my friends and went through everything that had been important to me in the past 10 years. There's something like nostalgia already trying to bite me and I haven't even left yet! It's even more ironic now, since such a large number of my friends from here have moved on and moved out over the past few years, so it's not like I can say that I have so many friends out here anymore. Which only makes my friends here that much more precious. I know I am horrible at keeping in touch, and who knows if we'll even talk once I move, and I have no friends in the place to which I'm moving, so I'm scared. It becomes so much harder to meet people when you're not in school anymore: when you're not all the same age and in the same place and more or less same situation. At work it becomes more about the age difference, and the family or single, and whether you've had enough time to brush your teeth let alone hang out and whether you even want to see the people you work with outside of work. I know it all manages to work itself out in the end, somehow, but it doesn't really help knowing this right now.