I'm not old, but apparently I'm older.

Here is what I think: I think it is amazing that I have a friend that I have had for eighteen years.

I'm not old enough for that.

Except that I am, apparently.

Ray and I became friends fudging science lab results together in seventh grade. His is my oldest friendship and he is the person with whom I have had the second longest phone conversations (and that's really saying something).

I also consider his wife Marissa a friend. In my head she is a new friend, a friend who is married to another friend. Marissa is Ray's wife, but I like talking to her on her own merits (I wonder how many people really feel that way about their old friends' spouses, when they've known one partner much longer than they've known the other). And yet I was realizing the other day that I have known Marissa for over ten years too, which is longer than I have known several of my other friends, people whose friendships are independent of spousal or familial ties to anyone else I know.

I don't feel that different than I felt five or ten or even fifteen years ago, and yet fifteen years ago was half my life ago. I feel like there's been this line of more or less adult consciousness that started sometime in adolescence, and the major division in my life is before that line and after it. For all the milestones that have passed since, none of them feel as real or as significant as that marker between adult consciousness and what came before, even though it wasn't a defining event like a birth or a graduation or a wedding.

I'm not old, but apparently I'm older.