Friends.

Friends.

Why does my title have a full stop with it? I never know. But it just felt like it is required. Like it would add meaning, and enough sanctity, and express the importance the word has.

Ever wonder what you might do if you had no friends at all? The world would have been a horrible dark place.

A world with friends is one beautiful place. It is a little easier to laugh, a bit more easy to share, easier to find a shoulder to cry, not so hard to hold a hand, easier to reach home after getting drunk, and easier to get up after falling.

But what if your world of friends suddenly drifts apart, that too, like it were meant to be. Transition is the hardest thing. Especially in friendship.

All of us have had best friends, some of them kinky and kind, some selfish but sweet, some strong but scared, some bold and hearty. Some funny and pretty, some dull but worthy.  Our friends are like the bone marrow. They fill up the empty spaces in our life, and make us complete in every way. Our friends, we cannot do without, for reasons that need not and cannot be expressed.

We, had a gang.

Of the coolest, funniest and smartest students in the school. We were about seven. And today there is no one to call when I am lonely and these spaces have returned.

Yes I talk to almost every one of them today too, but the distance is greater. We are still at the same place, but in different worlds. Does age has something to do with it? Change in choices? New friends? Fights? Pain, and arrogance? Or just transition?

There are no Xs and Ys in this story, even though love stories played a part in drifting us into pieces, but that is not what I blame. My friends, yes I still believe in the word, moved on, like they say.

No big blew ups ever happened, just the same small old ones which some of us had lost the capacity, patience and will to heal any longer. We had lost the eagerness and the excitement we had in each other’s company. We did not want to run after each other and hold the group together with love anymore, we had started, like they say, to let go.

The story just doesn’t start anywhere, only that my friends found their better halves within and outside the group and their romantic rivalries ironed the cracks I had stitched as a mediator a long time back. My jokes which overlapped the tension and envy and anger we all held deep in our minds were extinguishing fast. All my advice was exhaust and I could no longer be at different places at the same time.  Priorities played politics, and we started exploring the world outside our little cocoon of a gang. The candy outside allured most of us and we chose it over our gang. So old friends were expected to wait around like they do and hold our back, while we explored the new world.

It is strange that I had seen this coming for over a year and all it took was just one month for us to become a b c and d and no longer, b and group. Moment of Impact. I was practically not in school, out for events for over  a month, I would meet my friends for brief instances, steal a bite from their lunch, shake hands, crack a joke like I do and cupid play a little and leave them to themselves. Over the month that I missed school, not only did I get pushed away from my friends, but their ties with each other too weakened. Now when I entered the dorm in school, I would see them walking past each other with their girls and groups and a certain people sitting alone in different conformists spots. We were broke. And unfortunately nothing I could do anymore would bring us back together.

I fought with my best-est friend ever. The only person I could talk fun and serious just the same and the only one who knew that spicy food made me cry. He had found a new group and I hated him for that. I punched him, hugged him and made him promise he wouldn’t let go. He did. And I did nothing to make him stay. With no regrets. For when I let go, I expected him to understand how much I mean to him and turn around and laugh and stay.

But everything is not like a fairy-tale. There are huge cavities in my friend circle as it is today, de facto there are bigger empties in my life. But there is no one to come and take those spaces, for the people who left them made them a little too large to be healed.

What is strange is that no one in my group understands the pain we are in, it was like all of them were my friends and none each others. They talk to me yes, but no one is heard anymore.

There is a young friend shouting inside of me, calling them back, screaming how important they are, that without them I’d be nothing. They are standing a millimeter away from me but they can’t hear the noise. Not because they do not want to. But because they can’t. They alas, have undergone the painful devil some transition of friendship.

This is not a story which says that some friends come and go, nor about how some are meant to be. But just a story which explains that we, without rationale, hope for a certain of these to stay.

How to do I finish this memoir? Would a full stop suffice to give it enough sanctity, or would it still leave me unexpressed like each day I walk past them, people that I had customized fives with, sometime before, making sure our eyes don’t meet today? Would it?