Friendship remembered..

Maybe not the best of times to celebrate a friendship day but perhaps the best of times to revere and relish the friendships we have infused into your lives, so deep and so wide that they no longer feel different from our lives.

Friendships that changed each life event, that made each milestone seem different and created a ‘tag’ for each stage of our lives. Friends that interspersed with our lives so unknowingly that you can no longer differentiate the era from the friendship…

So you can never walk through your childhood corridors without the memories of the uniformed buddies who gulped canteen food and gossiped with the same energy… you can never remember Math without the ‘combined study’ sessions with a set of confused school buddies where we ate more and understood less of Math…you can never forget that cusp of adolescence without remembering the endless nights of girl talks…

You cannot but reminiscence of days of rebellion and ‘I know it all’ phases where your pride, your professional studies and your thoughts all mingled and molded in the company of friends we kept.. the journeys of studies and cramming, of thoughts, dreams, and ideas, of those ‘retro denims’ and hideous hairstyles – never a moment that you can savor without the friends who circled around you every moment…

And when life took you on uncharted territories of employment ,matrimony , motherhood and the likes…old faces, new faces all followed us through – some holding anchor, some ‘compassing’, some jesting, some steering and some simply ‘present’ to make the voyage a meaningful one..we aged, matured, ripened (and rot?) with friends in tow..

So this Friendship Day though I never understood ‘days’ and their meanings, I do feel a sense of longing, love and despair - did I hug enough, laugh enough and talk enough while I had the chance? While we mask and isolate ourselves more, can we hope for those nights of abandon and days of chatter and conscience cleansing conversations?

Perhaps this too is a phase where your zoom calls and virtual meet-ups will merge into the memory that we can create of a phase of COVIDness and isolation..and where memories are being made, a friendly face and a warm hand will never be too far away?