On the Stairs by the Front Door...

Why is it that, at least for us and our personal interactions with good friends, the best is always last?

(or...   is it like that for most everything in life? and why am I so philosophical all of a sudden? Is this a side effect of having hours and hours of lovely, intellectually stimulating conversations with friends we  don't see often enough?)

This feels good, though... this talking for two hours sitting (or standing up, even, like tonight) on the stairs by the front door. "Pretending" that the friends will leave soon because, you know... they must, but talking and talking a bit more until it's not just minutes anymore, but hours.

Experiencing this reminds me of the wonderful, amazing late night conversations that we had during the 5 years we were in college and had this incredible group of friends that met nearly every weekend  -- that was back in São Paulo, Brazil, over 16 years ago and it still shapes our lives so strongly that sometimes I think it's just so sad that we're so far away from most of our friends from back then.

Why did we decide to move to another country again? And leave all those friendships behind?  I sometimes ask myself... (I mean, they 're still there, but kind of "frozen" in time). When we can interact with people again on the same level all these years later again (finally!), I feel at peace with that decision. We wouldn't have met these new people hadn't we moved...

You know, it's hard, though. These past 15 years have been tough, and if it weren't for blogging, I would have given up on having friends and being happy in that part of my life as an expatriate person.

So I'm eternally thankful for these moments on the stairs. They mean the world to me.