the age of moving forward

24, it seems, is the age it all decided to hit. Everyone says it's right after college--the friends getting married, other friends having endless babies. Right after college was three years ago for me, and at the time I thought, Well, so much for that. My three best friends were still in school, sure, but none of them were dating (not by choice; I like to think we were selective, but mostly we were just bewildered as to why we couldn't find anyone at school we were interested in dating). I wasn't aware of the emotional mess I was at the time, so it was only, oh, a year and a half, two years ago that the thank God I didn't find someone stupid enough to date me at that time awareness hit.

A year and a month ago, my three best friends came out here to visit me in my (fairly) newly Zen, contented life. We sat around a table and wondered when it would start for us, this so-called life of moving forward. Most of us were settled in careers, which was comforting, and I thought, in my Zen-contentedness, It will start soon. In the next few years, one of us will meet someone. And then another one, a little while after that. And we will follow, in bits in pieces. That is how it will be for us.

I like to think I was sort of right, though the timeline was, apparently, seriously way more compact than I expected. That conversation was April, a year ago. In May, Grace met and started dating Scott, who she will marry this August. In June, Amy met her Scott (we shall have to come up with nicknames. So far I am calling them "Grace's Scott" and "Amy's Scott," which is a bit too clunky). And in May, two weeks after Grace met her Scott, I met Rob.

In March, I went to three weddings. I have another the end of this month, another the beginning of next month, another in July, Grace's in August. Another friend called me last week to tell me she's engaged. A childhood friend had a baby two weeks ago. Various friends across the country either have less-than-one-year-olds or are pregnant. It's as though this moving-forward-life decided to happen everywhere all at once.

As for my own moving-forward-life...well, it seems that three years was precisely the right amount of time to wait.