In Memoriam

Dear Non-Existent Reader,

Since I am finished with high school now and am patiently waiting to go to uni, this post is an attempt to keep fresh in my mind the last years of high school. Admitted, they were the crappiest school years of my life, but they did bring their share of epiphanies along, one most important of which I would like to elaborate upon today.

So to set the scene, I’ll say this- I joined my school DPS Noida in class six. I studied there for seven years. From sixth through tenth, I had a circle(my mother says gang) of closely knit friends- we were a group of six or so, very nerdy, spectacle wearing, mark-haggling school kids. You could go blind with our collective brilliance. Or so I thought then. And since I am not very practical about most matters in life, my super melodramatic pre-teen brain built up this impossible fantasy of how we would remain friends for our lives (like they show in the movies), see each other through thick and thin (like they show in the movies) and walk into the sunset, holding hands, laughing, our eyes full of promises (like they show in the,; you get the drift). And my, oh my, what a shock did I get when we moved to eleventh.

Now I had heard from my friends, seniors and cousins and extended family that the jump from tenth to eleventh would be palpable. New teachers, new subjects, a certain shifted mindset and a newfound independence. They might have been wrong. Or not. For me, eleventh implied a radical shift in the friendship scene. The six of us were no longer bound by a classroom or common teachers or even common subjects. We would meet in the recess now and then to catch up, having to stave off of a meagerly five minutes rather than the hour long arguments I was used to. We didn’t sit nearby in class, hell; we sometimes didn’t see each other throughout the day.

I like to think that my super-practical, head-over-heart friends took it well. Bitter medicine, swallow it quickly. I didn’t give in to this new scheme of things that easily. My world pretty much crashed around my ears loudly. Yes, you can roll your eyes for the melodrama. But at least to me, that was what it felt like. And what was worse, I seemed to be floating alone in this abyss of loneliness. Everyone seemed to forget and move on; forget the promises of undying everlasting friendship we had made to each other. Granted, they would reminisce about it every week or two, but I could tell the intensity of that companionship was slipping away. Lightning never strikes twice, reader. And once I had the magic in the bottle I was reluctant to let go of it. I hung on tenaciously.

Here, I have a confession to make. As you may have surmised from what I have written till now, I am not the world’s most practical person. I am ruled by my heart, I am impulsive but boy do I score in the obsessive-possessive category. And I hate change. You might wonder how I survive in a world where change is the only constant, but the change that I am talking about refers to change in interpersonal relationships. In short, I would like people to stay the way they are, while I prance about and conquer the world. It is a very, very poor attitude I have and one day it’ll be the end of me. And I hate adapting to an unsavory situation. I usually try my hardest to make things the way they were before or the way I’d like them to be. My friend(s) are people who breeze past changes gracefully. I struggle along.

So as the weeks went by, the situation only worsened. Once in a week became once in a month. Hour long conversations became quick snippets of hellos and how-do-you-do’s. Things were refusing to look up. When we did meet, we kept talking about the coursework and the insurmountable workload and the pressure and the boring whatnots. Stuff I strictly didn’t want to talk about, stuff I wanted to run away from. Who on earth wants to talk about a physics problem set when you have just bloody come out of a sleep-inducing physics lecture? The jokes got worse (if that is at all possible) and the laughter even more forced than ever. There was a doom-and-gloom around everyone while they fussed about coaching classes while I tried to frantically gesture at the dead body that was me.

I was almost angry at my peers for adapting. When they would wave to an unknown face down the corridor or talk to someone-who-was-not-a-gang-member about their physics classes, I seethed with venom; I hated it all with vitriol. My friends were mine. Did you get that? Mine. Forever and two days.

Clearly, I had to get out of this vortex of cling-o-mania. It wasn’t serving anyone. I snapped at people, I was moody and bluesy; I acted like a total retard.

Then help came from unexpected quarters. My fairy-godmother arrived in the form of another non-gang friend (yes, I was allowed to have non-gang friends) from another town. She had moved from Delhi three years ago but somehow had never found a social footing in the new place. As I railed and ranted about how horrendous life was, she gave me a patient hearing.

Then.

Then, she sat me down. She looked me in the eye the way doctors (the kind ones) look at you when they are going to give you a particularly painful injection; they don’t lie to you about the pain nor do they distract you from it by uttering inanities, they simply keep quiet, administer the dosage and let you deal with the pain your way (melodramatic parable, I know).

“It is never going to be the same. Do you hear me?”

My brain stubbornly refused to process the input. What not same? It would all be alright in a jiffy!

“Stop it, already. You aren’t twelve anymore. You’re sixteen. Grow up. Stop playing with these silly fantasies. Your friends are doing what’s best for them. It would be better if you do too. Stop this emotional dependence drama already.”

Ok. Maybe I’m paraphrasing this a bit.

And I looked like a lost deer caught in the headlights.

It took me two days to work myself up to it. Yes, she was right. My action-reaction circle was not helping things along. What did I have to do? Get into college. The friendship would stay. Or wither away. It was as much their choice as it was mine. I had to untether myself from this emotional beggary. I had to get out of this label of “gang friend” and “nongang friend”. Another aside- I treated all my other acquaintances poorly in favor of this divine, deity-like group of friends. So I practically had alienated everyone else.

The proceedings were best summed up by one word-shit.

So I started the process. Untethering myself. I reached out, made more friends, found more and more common interests with people I had looked down upon. I grew out of the labels, I stopped (almost) being a total snob. I looked for people I got along with; I looked for momentary connections that stayed instead of hauling heavy, fragile baggage.

Today, I am nobody’s no more. Sure, I keep in touch with that sacred gang, we talk now and then, but I don’t subscribe to labels anymore. I have more friends than ever, I look for diversity- Someone to talk to about your celebrity guy crushes, someone to talk to about the best places to dine in Delhi, someone to talk about the deeper meanings in life, someone to bitch about people with, someone to talk about living the good life in Madison Avenue, someone to discuss calculus with, someone to discuss Dean Martin with, the list goes on.

I have one come-home-to friend. If she is reading this, she’ll know. That one person who says go ahead, you be ambitious and impulsive and prance around like a total clot, I’ll still be here when you come back, I‘ll be practical without smothering you with it, I’ll never say “I told you so”. Everyone has got a come-home-to friend. Or should have one, in my opinion.

Now I am happy. Things might change. Things will change. But I will swim with the tide rather than stubbornly hold on to an anchor.

Life is good.