Last week I got a pedicure in a shiny turquoise blue, and today it matches my shirt, and it makes me think of my dear friend K. in London, whom I haven't seen since September. These days I only see her twice a year or so, and even then that's just luck, based on her annual jaunts here and my annual jaunts there. If people are colors, she is turquoise, or aqua, or chlorine blue -- whatever you want to call it. She is bright and clear and smooth and vivid. At her wedding she wore satin turquoise heels and he wore a turquoise bow tie and the bridesmaids wore turquoise dresses and so here I am, 3,000 miles away, thinking of her because of my toes, thinking of the baby's breath in her hair and the bagpipes playing and the walk across the Royal Naval Academy in Greenwich that fine spring day in our heels.

All of the best people in my life, except for my family and a couple of childhood friends, I've met mostly as an adult. Is that normal? Is it a result of having changed so much in the past 15 years of my life, of, to borrow a phrase from a book I'm currently reading (The Vanishers), giving birth to my true self and then willing those people into existence?

As a teenager I couldn't imagine where I'd be in my early thirties. Did I think I would have friends scattered across the world, with accents I'd never heard, with careers and lives and perspectives that make me shine? Did I know things would be this incredible? I mean, is anyone where they thought they'd be, with lives they thought they'd have?