Time may change me, but I can’t trace time….

I don’t do very well with change. It’s best when I can prepare myself for it- as with a big move or starting school or getting a new job. But lately I’ve noticed all these subtle changes- changes that, taken by themselves, are minute but all together constitute this big, huge life change that I was totally unprepared for. And it’s kinda freakin’ me out!
 
You know those insidious, little changes that I’m talking about….They happen all the time, interrupting the flow of your status quo- your friend who you hung out with all of the time has a clingy, annoying significant other and now you never see them; your favorite drinking buddy has decided to move cross-country; your new job has such weird hours that the only people you find yourself spending time with are other with your fucked up schedule and you realize you haven’t returned your best friends’ calls in weeks; you wake up one morning and realize that you spend all of your time with your new boyfriend, even though you just thought that you were casually dating; you find yourself inexplicably attracted to that boy in your Hebrew school class that you’ve hated since 3rd grade because he used to harass your best friend mercilessly and now, when he’s nice to you and shares his peanut chews with you, you feel so guilty that you stop talking to your friend altogether to avoid feeling like a traitor. There are a million different ways that our relationships change with one another- and not all of them are bad, like the ones mentioned above (I mean, who would’ve thought that the girl I’d get stoned with after my hideously early morning copy editing class would end up evolving into one of my best friends? Ditto the chick who sat down the hall from me at Atlantic who I thought hated me until we started karaoking together at Arlenes?)- but sometimes these little changes crescendo into one big change. You can actually feel how your life is going to be different, like how you can tell on that one day in October when the air gets brisk and is free of the fetid humidity that plagued it all summer that it is time to put away the tank tops because you won’t be needing them until June. The air just somehow feels different.
 
Well, the air feels different now. And I think it is making me kind of crazy and anxious. Even though I feel settled for the first time in months (what with a kind of steady job and a new apartment), everything seems terribly impermanent and that impermanence is making me sad. I can’t help it.