WHAT GOES AROUND

To

S



We have known each other for more than a decade. And we have known nothing. We have lived like the best of friends and the worst of enemies. Sometimes like two peas in a pod. Sometimes like venomous vipers in the bushes. But as far as this futile venting goes, although ten years sounds like a very long time, it’s like we have not lived at all. For all practical reasons, we are too young to border on the vast, absurd dome of experience.

Yet.

But soon we will be.

And what happens then? There is something so wrong with where a sense of nothingness leads our rusting memories. For example, when we do get to that dome of experience with a few strands of grey hair (hopefully) left on our scalps, what will we even think about each other’s names scribbled on a sad, yellowed scrap of notebook paper from fifth grade. Or, will we even ‘think’ about each other?

Maybe.

Maybe, not.

Though I hope it is the former and not the latter, there is always that nagging, yet disturbingly familiar feeling which whispers quietly to me, and says: oceans, sands, time zones and every random thing in between that goes around in the world, as it pirouettes on its axis like a fat ballerina, will only serve to separate us more. Pencils with attached erasers, fancy lunch boxes, all that Disney magic, water bottle wars, music from the 2000’s crashing into an EDM whirlpool etc. is already in the past. The stuff of the ‘future’ has arrived, and neither of us can decipher it. But it is here. And just like Disney fizzled out from our new adult lives, you and I grow fuzzy in each other’s memories. Something changed about the way you do your hair. Something changed about the shape of my glasses. And somewhere in the middle of such trivialities, we didn’t quite catch up with each other as perfectly as we imagined, as we once very well could. But we might have told ourselves otherwise and cozied up in self-reassurance.

So we aren’t connected, no matter what Facebook or Whatsapp or an emoji tells us in order to deceive us into complacency about the present. We just are not. It will never work out. Because we are not our older selves anyway, and time cannot be frozen and reheated like last night’s dinner. I prefer what we were though, absurd as it sounds, since what has been has been, and cannot be revived. I preferred it when our conversations slid into each other’s seamlessly, when memorable quotes slipped off the top of our heads, when spontaneous laughter just poured into a gamut of more silliness without prior warning at the end of a tiresome day… Back when… Back when…



But because we are the sort to be swayed by letters and specimens of bold, handsome cursive handwriting, every word hurled meaningfully ‘online’, comes across meaningless.

And just like that, I know now we’ve changed...


Yours truly