— Devika Dinesh
I’d read somewhere a long time ago that one’s twenties is characterized by the turbulent nature of one’s friendships. Essentially the notion that, ‘people come and go’. And yet, losing a friendship that had spanned half a decade felt like a cruel plot twist that I couldn’t have predicted.
All of a sudden the girl I used to talk to for hours on end during my school days, the girl I used to share all of my novels with, the woman who had my back during some of the rockiest periods of my life, the friend who had stayed up all night while I panicked – was a stranger.
I don’t know what she reads these days, if she reads at all. I don’t know what she does with her days. I have no clue about the people in her life, where she stays, or if she still has nightmares everyday. I do know that, somewhere along the way, we became a bit too different to coexist and that our friendship was well past its use-by date.
Not enough consolation but I’ve come to the realization that it’s not just me. I caught up with an old friend recently, and she mentioned in passing how she hadn’t talked to her best friend in months. Another friend told me about how she’s worried her group of friends from school might be drifting apart. <I may have overused the word friend a tad bit, but bear with me, we’re almost done>
While all of this comes with a certain dread and a sense of tragedy, I’m glad to have had those friendships in the first place. I suppose the value of a relationship does not depend on its durability as much as it does on the experience itself. While it lasts.
My final takeaway here is just this: As tiring as I find online mediums of communication and as easy as it gets to slip into comfortable solitude, people matter. So when I find myself procrastinating on replying to a message, or calling up a friend I haven’t talked to in a while, I take a minute. And I pick up the phone.
Edited by Anoushka Agastya
Design by Alphin Tom
Article 19 