Nearly five months after leaving her job at Today, Hoda Kotb misses seeing her friends every weekday — especially Savannah Guthrie, with whom she co-anchored the NBC morning show.

“I just had coffee with Savannah a little more than a week ago, and we sat across from each other and, in that one hour, we laughed, we cried, we held hands. She shared all this personal stuff, and I did, too. And she asked me, ‘Tell me what it’s like on the other side,’” Kotb said in a new People interview. “And I said, ‘I’ll tell you what I miss: I miss this.’ I miss walking in a room and having an instant daily connection that you don’t have to put on a calendar.”

She added: “I saw Savannah and [Today With Jenna & Friends host] Jenna [Bush Hager] every day, without fail, and we shared our lives. It’s so funny. It’s not the work part of it, but I miss that a lot. It’s like an empty space for me.”

Guthrie, meanwhile, told People, “I’ve missed [Kotb’s] giggle so much. She could really walk in a room, giggle, and everything in the world just fades away.”

Kotb now has a lot more time with her daughters, Haley, 8, and Hope, 6, and she’s also launching a wellness company called Joy 101. But post-Today life meant an adjustment for the TV journalist.

“When someone erases your schedule and says, ‘OK, here you go. Have fun,’ you’re sitting there going, ‘Oh my gosh, what am I supposed to be doing right now?’” she told People.

For a while, it seemed like Kotb’s life was going to get much busier, since she was rumored to be taking over The Kelly Clarkson Show from Kelly Clarkson, who’s rumored to be on her way out of her self-named talk show. But Kotb shot down that speculation last week during a Today interview. “If I ever came back to TV, do you know where the only place I would ever come back to is?” she asked Guthrie and new co-anchor Craig Melvin. “Right here.”

And those talk-show rumors? “Delete, delete,” Kotb said. “Not true.”

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