The Curse of Friendship

The lady comes back with prophecies made long time back only to prove that she was right. For all the hours and minutes spent trying to challenge age old wisdom it was a battle I was destined to lose. The only critical factor was time. At thirteen, the world is different. Realism hardly sets in at that time and vision is limited to the next 100 yards.

At that age, relationships appear to be everlasting. Love is sacred. And the pledge of friendship beyond question. The lady in a fit of exasperation at my obsession with friends had warned me of a junk investment, if you were to look at one purely in terms of return. If it was a question of riding over the next few years, about sharing some time and space together, she was fine. What she objected to was the over emphasis and the price tag I put on it.

Of all the time I have spent on this wretched planet, I think I would have been well served if I had nomadic relationships rather than the ones which continued to defy time. Old friends are like old wine. They ought to be exploited and brought out once in a while to let you remember of 'those days' where life was uncomplicated and promises were meant to be kept. More often than not friendships are based on unspoken contracts which require no law to be executed but are more sacrosanct than any other legal document you can create. It is those unspecified and unwritten clauses which when honoured make friendships beautiful. It is when those are consigned to mere corollaries and overlooked which renders it useless. And as per the lady in question, such renderings are just a day away.

Life is beautiful but the action of living it is what makes it a drudgery. It is at those times that you need the return on the incredible amount of time and energy and emotional quotient that you have invested. And it is precisely at that moment that life hits you with its greatest weapon and numbing force - reality.

The reality is startling and quite devastating. Maybe, it was always like that. Maybe I never took the sunglasses off for fear of being blinded. Or maybe, I never thought that it had the capacity to blind. In hindsight, those idiots who stunned us simply by their unapologetic superficiality, were not idiots after all. They understood that in time, friends might be there and might not be. What we do and make and what we are, are questions that is best answered by oneself. Finally when you stand and look around, you will see your friends - basking in collective glory if you have made a success out of your life or looking at you with forlorn eyes and paying lovely lip service if you have not. What would be sadly missing is the honest intent of feeling either of them or even depressingly is the intention to honour those pledges. That is when you feel the sense of wastage.

I guess that is what my mother used to warn me of.