Day One Hundred Thirteen, in Which Things (Soon) Fall Apart

I've been part of social groups a hair away from dissolution before: the end of elementary school; the end of summer camp; the end of high school; a friend group (or five) held together by a set of relationships become newly tenuous.

But: I've never been in social group so aware of its own impending disintegration. We're no longer sufficiently callow, maybe. So, this, this: this fairly homogeneous group of 94 (give, take) students from 30 or so different colleges. Our social graph has a strange destiny: mesa. A sharp uptick four months ago, a plateau in which the only undulations are slight, those of formulaic social recalibration, and then a searing plunge, hardly tempered by faint promises of reconciliation and quixotic Facebooking. The precipice doesn't come until next week, but there's a palpable sensation of cessation, punctuated like the tick, tick, tick of an ascending roller-coaster. It slips beneath the pregamed dancing and smeary conversation the way dark matter pirouettes behind regular matter, changing the way galaxies rotate and bending light from distant stars. Or, to shift cosmological metaphors, background radiation: It's not something anyone thinks or talks about on the daily, but turn your rabbit ears between the channels and try to tell me there's no static. I imagine it sort of like a group of houseguests who can see that, yeah, the house is on fire, sure, but the drapes haven't even caught yet so here's another Gaga track. That's not to suggest we should all run out of the house, sooty and hysterical, and stand on the lawn and watch it burn and go home and listen to The Shins: I'm not Paul Revere, here. To go out in my tricorne and cry "THE END IS COMING" is about as prophetic as shouting "THIS IS THE OLDEST WE'VE EVER BEEN" or "IN FOUR YEARS, A MAJORITY OF US WILL BE MARRIED."

We know. Don't remind us. The carpet's barely smoldering, anyway.