Remember your best friend in grade 8? I remember mine. We used to talk on the phone for 8 hours straight till my mom would come out of her room at 6AM and glare at me with hints of disbelief and quite prominent traces of anger in her eyes. It would take a lot of scolding and many threats of being ‘phone-grounded’ from my mom to make me stop talking to my best friend. 7 years later, I don’t even know how she’s doing.
It’s the summer of 2019 and I’m about to enter into my junior year which quite honestly I’m still having a hard time believing. But having one of those early 20s crises most of us are pretty familiar with at this point, I’m wondering where it all went wrong. We all have had friends we used to be close to in junior school or college but are not anymore. Some have fought their way into distance and some have ‘drifted apart’ from people they could hardly imagine their lives without. But somewhere in our heads, when we see photographs of our school plays or when Facebook and Snapchat memories rub it in our noses, we stop and think about what genuinely went wrong. Like an epiphany it hits me: being in my early 20’s means I’m about to graduate and it technically also means that these friends I’ve made in my entire life, they are the ones who will know about all the phases I will never want my work friends to know about, They will know about the crazy haircuts, the emo diary entries, the dramatic junior school break ups and all the shameful playlists and posters we had. They will also be the people who have seen our families struggle and make it to where they are, who have seen us fall in love for the first time, they have encouraged us to follow our dream and apply for that English degree everyone else thinks is useless. They are a part of who we are at this point in our lives and we may find many more friends and acquaintances in life but will they will really only know one half of who we are.
I’m afraid this sounds more dramatic than I intended, but it hits me like a slap in the face and I reach out to all the old friends, afraid of not being able to connect like we did in the past yet taking the risk because if not now, then when? We come out of school, looking forward to college and leave college thrilled about going to a university; amidst all these huge changes what we fail to realize is that somewhere between the transition from uniforms to casual kurtis, we forget about the priceless feeling we got when we made that first best friend in grade 6 and promised it was forever.
PS: It’s not too late to text the friend you haven’t seen in years, the friend you terribly miss when you see a packet of cocomo or a cold drink poured in a plastic bag-‘Kal ho na ho’, my friend (shameless Bollywood reference because it can truly never be irrelevant).