Have you ever noticed that the life is just drifting away slowly leaving you behind in some sort of confused and ever nagging loneliness? This feeling starts hitting you when you miss your friends, friends who have been your part and parcel of your life, with whom you have spent all your time and one day they all are gone away and you are left alone to your self. You get to meet new people with whom you are forced to make friendship or sometimes it just happens due to similarity in thoughts or due to interactions that makes it necessary to extend the hands of friendship. Well everyone will have to pass through this situation. You become so nostalgic and would subject oneself to constant rewinding of past incidents through photos stored in your hard disks or videos taken in your mobile phones.

The sheer thoughts about your college days brings back the hero in you. The days spent with friends keep flashing in your mind and your mind starts drifting itself into its past. Friends always stay near you at some point of time. You hang out with them, talk with them, go for trips, treats and eat outs. This creates an itch in your mind that keeps itching you, making you addicted to them. You start loving their company and  would want to meet them as frequently as possible. This is just like a recursion logic that keeps calling itself until one day it finds a condition to terminate that loop. Life also provides such conditions for people.

As I’ve already said in my previous post about “moving on” in life. So the life keeps moving on and so are the people in our lives. Many of them change company, some change the country. This happens one by one with the people in our lives, leaving you stranded in a lonely island full of new people. You miss their calls, messages. The numbers stored in your mobile phone’s contact list becomes obsolete one by one and each one of them gets removed from the “fwd msg” distribution list. The local number becomes a national one and the national number sometimes becomes a Skye contact. You have to depend on Gtalk, Skype and various other social networking medium to contact them and talk with them.

You slowly realise that, you are growing up and your are somewhere in the mid twenties. All college and school students become “kids” and you hate people shouting and chatting loudly in the buses. Group talk becomes nuisance and you prefer silence in the buses and cars. You prefer plugging into some iPod or mp3 players and listen to music rather than having a talk with someone sitting beside you. You realise that you have conversed so loudly and laughed so much in the bus when you were with your best buddies and everyone sitting around you turned and gave a cheap stare at you. Now that you have become one among them staring at loudly talking people. You have become a “Grownup”!!

One day, you realise that all your friends who joined with you in the company you are working, have left one by one and you have to remove them from the official instant messaging list. Their official email ID becomes obsolete and you practically understand that when you receive a message from the postmaster with the subject “Failure Delivery – Couldn’t find the address or mailbox doesn’t exists”. Friends are a major part of our lives. We spend time with them and share almost everything with them – likes, dislikes, food, money and even crushes. Our mind is reluctant to accept the fact that, we cannot be always with them. We have to move on.

Life keeps us busier always with something or the other. First its the school where we made friends. Later we finished schooling, wrote slam books, shared contact number and email IDs. Then we joined college, again made friends, had lot of fun, shared our lives in and out in classrooms, canteens, labs, mukku kadai-s and in hostels and mess. But we never felt the distance anytime. Even when we get jobs and start working, we keep in touch with them though forward messages, group mails, weekend meet-ups and movies. But when the life gets more busier, we find less time for all that. Weekends becomes “Dorm-ing days”. We sleep, sleep and sleep out of hectic-ness that has crept into our life. Everyone becomes busy. Some move on for higher studies and some change jobs and some get married. Your friends circle shrinks its diameter and at one point of time it becomes a straight line.

Friends at work come to your rescue. Again you start living with a new circle of friends and this time the diameter keeps increasing and you again start enjoying your time with the friends. Chatting with them for long, hanging out in the weekends, movies and much more. You even find your girl. In-spite of such new relationships, you enjoy being with your friends. Life moves swiftly with college friends at one side and your work friends on the other side.

One fine day, you find your job sucks big time and you desperately want a change. A change that will bring a big change in your life. You think about it and finally make a decision to change your job. Fiasco sets in and you start missing all your friends again. You are not just changing your job but altogether moving away from all of them with whom you have been with, for the part years. Now that you are losing your own official mail ID which you have acquired long back and to which your inbox gets flooded with heaps of “Forward mails”. Again you become sentimental. You curse God for making you missing friends. You leave and find a new job. Now you find yourself stranded in a place of unknown people. You find everything new. you have to get accustomed to new way of living and working. You miss your old cubicle and your company. You start saying “It wasn’t the way it is here…”. You envy on people who hangs out in gangs and laughs out loud (Yea the same LOL!). You are just left to yourself. You have to eat your breakfast and lunch in the food courts alone. You don’t know where to keep the soiled plates. You don’t know in which counter you have to get the ordered item in the FC. You consciously walk towards the hand wash area. You realise that people around you are staring at you with the “just joined” or “new guy here” looks. *Sigh* what a comfort zone I’ve created for myself and now I’ve come out of it. You have to make new friends again.

You again wish for all your old companions. You see everyone is worried about their families. You see all your colleagues talking about their son or daughter. You are put into constant speculation about things around and about yourself. You are not the one you were some two or three years before. You find yourself still worrying about your friends. You then realise that you have to start worrying about yourself. You have to start working towards supporting yourself. You are a grown up now. You are no more a kid or immature just-out-of-college guy. No one likes your SMS, few likes them very much and asks you, “Why didn’t you send any messages. I was waiting for them”. You laugh at yourself. You still have hopes to be a kiddish, carefree, lazy, sleepy immature boy. You keep reminding yourself of not to become one of those serious, worried and always complaining jerks. You still remain a happy, friendly, always-smiling, humorous chap who would want to be open with everyone you meet in your life and create an interesting chapter of them. You make new friends and keep adding them to your “Besshht Friendssss” list.

Life is just drifting away. There is no time for hatred, jealous or regrets. Keep yourself open and welcome everyone. Love them all till you find friendship and love everywhere around you and you are fully drenched on it.

Thank you all my friends for becoming a good chapter in the pages of my book. You are “THE BEST”. You have made my life worthy and cherishable. “Hello” to all my future friends who would start making an entry into my pages of my life. Welcoming you all.

Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.  ~Chili Davis

Be cheerful and love all!!