Connection used to be so easy. A wave walking to class. A smile across the room. A glimpse around 250 other students sitting in identical chairs, venting about the same lectures and the same exams. Whispers through campus about this club or that professor. Connection used to be effortless, inevitable in that bubble. All it took was a few steps.

Now, a picture hangs on the wall in your apartment, in a city thousands of miles away from the people in it. You'll see them again in the vacation you plan once a year to some coastal beach town in Europe, but only for a week or two. Most of them live completely different lives-- maybe they're in grad school or married or living abroad. Now, you live in different time zones, and even when you do get a chance to catch up, you might stumble to find common ground.

As the years pass, you feel as if you've created an island. So disconnected from everyone outside of your city, your profession, your daily life. Work and life gets busy, and as the weeks stack up, they form an ocean around you. You're not as accessible as you once were, and neither are they.

And yet, when you set sail across the waters to reach them, it's all the more fulfilling in the middle of the ocean to see them-- drenched with salt and sweat --trying to reach you too.