Reunion weekend: Nick gets over-hugged by people he's just met and I wish time would stand absolutely still

I've lost my front door key. I can't find my phone. I still have random sparkles stuck to myself. I'm exhausted and a little teary.

I bet this is how it feels to come down from a three-day cocaine binge.

I'm guessing, because drugs are one of those things - like tons of casual sex or maybe threesomes - that I feel like I ought to have done in my twenties.

I have never been seize-the-day-y enough.

Not, of course, that people were offering me drugs or threesomes on streetcorners or anything. It's not like I was non-seizing left and right.

So.

So Kelli and Russ arrived early Thursday evening, and honestly, I didn't stop laughing until I dropped Kel at the airport this afternoon.

I've long felt that people don't really change as they age - they just become more so. You distill, I suppose.

We're all still who we were in high school - just more. More candid. Funnier. Smarter. Kinder. More experienced and wiser.

More cognizant of the fact that what we had in each other was rare, and the fact that we still have it is precious.

High school for us was a place without cliques, where everyone was accepted, embraced. It was a small school, and a small ex-pat community. You played sports, did theatre, were in the band, the science club, ran track - you did several or all of those things at once.

After high school, most of us went off to our own countries - the countries we were supposedly "from." I learned this weekend how lost so many of us were. We didn't know how to fit in where we were supposed to.

Eventually, we all figured out how to fit, more or less, and how to feel comfortable.

Quite a number of years have passed at this point.

We've been to college, gotten married, divorced, remarried, moved, had kids, bought houses, quit smoking, begun and ended careers, started businesses, lost hair, lost friends, lost parents.

We've grown up. But not apart, astoundingly enough.

Because in our hearts and souls, we are the same.

I always thought it was India that I longed for when I ached to be home, although I wasn't from India. And once my parents left, Delhi wasn't home.

And what I realized this weekend was, it was these people. They were my sense of place and belonging.

This past weekend, I was so very home.