Wordsweave

There was once a time, when I believed that friends are the center of one’s world. That anything you do must be measured against the standard ofyour friends’ approval. It was unthinkable to spend the lunch hour with anyone other than the usual set, as it was unthinkable to play in the evenings with the ‘others’, even if your own group was chatting about the dullest things under the sky and ‘they’ were building the most enchanting sand houses.

In those days, a friend’s moving away seemed like the end of the world. Even summer vacations, with all their joys, were always tinged with the misery of missing school friends. During those long summers, letters were exchanged even though you lived in the same town. Letters sprawled with mundane activities of summer, with silly decorative quotes and anecdotes borrowed from the magazine ‘Quotes’, always ending with Your best friend…, as if it was of utmost importance to claim best friend rights, repeatedly.

This sense of friendship became even stronger in college, even though the code became less strict. Life revolved more and more around people who were not family. You toiled with them, bitched with them, gossiped with them, broke rules with them, ate with them, relied on them, fought with them. Time seemed to fly as you spent hours walking around, or talking or dressing up. There were times when boyfriends affected those circles, and in the headiness of love you forgot friends for a while. But even then, if anyone had so much as suggested that I should perhaps not even see these people once a year one day, I would have thought it nothing more than a cynic joke.

Its a pity that I can no longer laugh at the joke. As years have grown, distances have become longer. I sometimes meet friends less freuently than once a year. Over awkward hours of coffee where we struggle to recreate the same sense of bonding. For old times sake. Often we are successful when those meetings are short. But give them a little time, and the awkwardness begins to crackle through that thin surface of appearance.

Even friends that stay close at hand, slowly begin to dissolve. Because we, them, all of us become too busy with  things that don’t give much joy.Things we think are important and mean much more than they really do. The sense of doing something important, being terribly busy, the drama of these is laughable and yet terribly sad. Traditions dissolve, of annual holidays, of parties. Even these friends you now meet on an errant birthday, sometime a new year’s party. You have already begun to lose them. To your silly TV shows, or to your day of home shopping, or to your sense of drama.  You feel closer to Jack Shepherd or Dale Cooper than you do to your old friends. You sit watching an episode of Friends, feeling that twinge of pain and envy, for having lost it. For not being able to share a carefree moment anymore.

When do friendships slide into reunions?