One is the loneliest Number

Though I've found two, three and occasionally five and seven can be just as lonely.
I've now been in Boston for almost four months and while I'm as settled in as I'm going to get, I still don't feel like I have (for lack of an English word) a chevra, or a group. (OK, so I found an English word).
Granted I haven't had that sort of group in several years; not since they all started getting married and moving to various cities around the country. But even so, I had a good core group of friends that I could rely on.
One by one that core group has gotten married off as well and moved around the globe, not just around the world. As much as I love one of my friends, with him living in Australia, there is a definite strain on our friendship.
I know that there are people in places like Chicago, LA, and Baltimore who I could count on when the chips are really really down, but I am finding myself really really needing that in Boston.
And I've come to realize more and more that as much as I love NY and plan on returning within the next few years, I will have to start from scratch in terms of friends. It's an odd thought and one that didn't come easy to me. I've always or since 1994 had a solid group of people I could count on whenever I lived or visited my favorite city on Earth. But marriage, fights, and general distance has lessened those ties and by the time I finally get my sorry ass back to the City, I don't expect those ties to be anything other than the occasional phone call followed by the rarer and awkward cup of coffee or beer.
How much of my affinity for NY is based on my happier memories of friends and good times past and how much is based on the actual city? While at this point I can't tell, I am sure it's at least split evenly and now when I think of NY it's no longer the people in it that come to mind as much as the institutions and cultural meccas. And I'm thinking this is a good thing.
When all is said and done, however, I am as of this moment, not in NY, but in Boston. I have made some casual friends through a book club and while I enjoy our bi-weekly excuses to drink and gossip, I have only really made one real friend out of that bunch and lo, she is moving to (wouldn't you know) New York within the next 2 months. Work is full of nice and friendly people, but very few are people that right now seem to be the sort who hang out with co-workers...or at least with me.
I feel like a broken record sometimes writing about being lonely and single and all that bullshit, but I think it's just been the overarching theme in my life for the past couple of years. I am truly truly longing to find someone and someones with whom I can connect; people who "get" me and who in turn I have "gotten". I do not expect that I am alone in this struggle. Most of us yearn for that sort of communion with friends and lovers, and maybe it is my bad luck to have experienced it so early in life. Maybe you're not supposed to have met people who really understood you at the age of 17 - because once they have left your life, you find yourself on the verge of 30 trying to recreate something that is similar to that experience. True, you can never really recreate the past, nor is it a good thing to try to do so; but if you have been happy and contented at one point, is it not human to attempt to seek out that same feeling again and again as you go through life?
I have not fully acclimated myself to that scariest of realizations: being alone forever and ever, no matter what else I've said till now. There is some slight hope somewhere in me that I'll be able to meet that right person with whom to spend the rest of my life and that I'll meet up with the right people who will be the rocks of friendship that I feel I am partially missing at this stage.
Problem is that I don't know which is worse: losing that hope or keeping it burning despite a preponderance of evidence that is it useless and misplaced.