Separation

From 1999 to 2004, I enjoyed a friendship with a Dutchman from Amsterdam. Jos and I had connected online and discovered that we had many mutual interests, strong enough that he agreed to fly over here for a visit. Trusting our instincts, we decided the first visit should be for two weeks. When those two weeks flew by, we decided his next visit should be extended to three weeks. Eventually he was coming over for 90 days, the maximum time he could visit on a visa waiver. I also made five trips to the Netherlands during that period of time and saw Europe as I had never seen it before, as a non-tourist who went to the grocery store as well as visited the sites of the Netherlands plus one trip down into Belgium. When Jos would visit here, I began to hook him up with a friend who owned a tutoring agency. I worked at that agency as a tester, going into homes and doing assessment tests to determine what help students needed. My boss was an avid golfer as was Jos. As for me, I had played some golf but always got more excited about finding balls than scoring low. Besides setting him up for golfing, I also took him to visit Florida sites, and we even took one trip to the mountains of North Carolina. As we became better friends, I began to notice that three or four days before Jos' departure for Amsterdam, he would seem depressed. It was certainly not strange as we always enjoyed each other's company a great deal and dreaded the separation. What was strange was his diagnosis caused by the separation we would endure until the next visit which he called pre-partum depression.