Today is Friday. I am meeting an old friend for drinks after work. She once worked here and called herself my "work wife". She left a few years ago but we still get together regularly to catch up. I miss her being here, for sure.  

She and I were close with another co-worker. He was the Site Engineer here. He also left a few years ago. We became so close that we had a routine on Friday of going to our own happy hour. Sometimes significant others came along, but that was rare. We called ourselves the Three Musketeers. So original, eh? It was such a regular thing that the bartender became used to us being there at the same time every Friday and she knew us by name, knew a lot of our personal stuff too. She would have our drinks ready as soon as she saw us coming. 

We also began hanging out together socially. I became friends with her husband and with his wife. Still am to this day although she and I rarely see each other. I spend a good deal of time with engineer guy and his wife though. 

It's hard to be in the workplace and have people you like to work with and become close to them, then they leave. There is a hole in the daily grind that cannot be filled. To this day, we all agree that the bond we had made work much easier. Even when things got hard, and sometimes things got really hard, we were able to be calm and cool together and accomplish good things. 

The unfortunate flip side is that now none of us have found anyone in the workplace that we can feel that reliance upon. I have been on an island since they left. Other people have replaced them place but it's not the same. They both have stated the same thing. They feel much lonelier at work without the dynamic we shared.

So, I'll meet up with her tonight and we'll have a nice time. We'll talk about life and tell each other how much we miss being together. Then we will mosey back to our separate worlds until the next time. It's a bittersweet kind of deal, feeling the excitement of seeing someone you miss and then feeling the loss when time is up. Again and again, we do this. It's kind of an odd thing that we humans do to ourselves, isn't it.