Tears at the farewell .
Promises to keep in touch .
Hoping that things won’t change .
Because nothing ever changes between best friends, does it?
Best friends. Then, yes.
Now, it was just complicated, as much as it
could get.
How well did I know my best friend?
Or how well did she know me?
If someone had asked us this back in our school days, I’m sure we both
would have answered “We know pretty much everything about each other. All that
there is to know.”
***
An uneasy silence crept inside our friendship, day by day.
Stealthily.
Slowly.
And we drifted apart.
Whenever I called her, all she had in her mind were her relationship
problems.
Whenever she called me, all she spoke about was boys, her exes and
well, relationship problems. Once. Twice. Thrice. And a million times more.
I kept hoping that she’d want to talk about something else for a
change. Anything else. Movies, shopping, TV, novels(not really her forte, but
still!). Anything would have done. Even ghosts/past-life/sun/moon/politics. Well,
you get the point. A-n-y-t-h-i-n-g.
Back in school, we could discuss about anything under the sun.
How much had things changed?
I asked a million times in my head, do I even know her?
The thought haunted me no end, it reverberated like an echo.
Questions infinite, answers absolutely zilch.
***
I found
myself not wanting to talk to her anymore. It was too much pain. The calls I still
had the strength bear. Somehow, they were my thin string of hope. But the
internal battle I had to fight after the call ended, the way my head went into
a zone, and how I felt uneasy for days on end, and how even at night I could not possibly stop pondering on how
and what went wrong. This battle was getting too much to fight. But I kept
bottling it up inside, in the hope she’d come back one day. Just like the way
she was.
One (un)fateful
day, that I had tried pushing farther and farther away, well, it arrived. And
we fought. She said I didn’t put many efforts in our friendship, and my
supposed ‘brainy’ college was the reason for it. And I told her what I had to,
the thing where she only talked about boys and herself, not even caring how my
life was like. I hoped that letting it out would sort out our problems. She
would understand. But I was taken aback with her answer. She said that this is
her. This is how she is. Has always been.
But I have
one message for her, if she’s reading this –
You know,
you are much more than what you like to believe.
You are not your
clothes,
Or your
silly boyfriend relationships,
You are the
smile you try to hide.
You are the
sweetness in your laughter and the tears you’ve cried.
You are the things
you believe.
You are the future
you dream of.
You are the people
you love.
And you continue
to belittle yourself when you choose to be defined by all the things you’re
actually not.
