12 weeks

Three months can be a long time, a short time or somehow simultaneously both. I think of my life lately in those measures. In the last nine months, for example, I've lived in three different cities in two different states in an apartment, a house and a dorm, respectively. During that time, I've worked for three different publications. On some days it felt like the three months I'd committed to was flying by. On others, it felt as if it would never end.
Three months is short enough to feel like a just a visitor. Yet it's long enough to make a new set of friends just weeks before your last day. It's the friends I often find myself thinking about. Friends for three months; both sides know the situation when they enter the deal. What happens after the goodbyes?
With a very few people, you keep your promise to stay in touch. You write occasional emails, maybe hang out if you're ever in the same place at the same time again. With other friends, you slowly stop talking. There's no real reason for the cease, but as weeks go by, you realize that the only similarities you had were the place you worked or lived. You still keep tabs on them, but your friendship really doesn't exist anymore. Then there are the friends who completely disappear. Emails bounce back with errors. Voice mails aren't returned. No one knows where they are, what they're doing. I guess it's just difficult to make a three-month friendship longer.
I think of all the people I've met in the last year. Editors and interns, scientists and students, star reporters and not-so-star ones. People I'd talk to on a daily basis whose last names have vanished from my memory. Living life in three-month spans is an endless cycle: from lonely stranger to slightly adjusted newcomer to friend and then back to lonely. It's somewhat numbing.