Edited by: Bhavika Rawat
“aa rhi hai na diwali pe ghar?” (Coming home for diwali, right?)
I love you. I love you so much. But that text, I’m sorry, is going to be be left on ‘delivered’ for quite some time.
And I hate myself. I hate myself so much. Because all I have to do is say “Yesss can’t wait to see youuu” with a few emojis to convey my excitement, but I can’t. And I don’t even know why.
I’m not excited when I should be. I’m not dying to meet you like I should be. I’m not. I should be.
We were two peas in a pod, two sides of the same coin; I serenaded you with the song “mai teri Ray, tu meri Nikhat hai” (from the series Adulting) in front of your extremely confused parents because you had had a bad day. You wrote me a fourteen page letter just because you wanted to.
When did it all go so stale?
I guess I do have an answer in my mind, one that I haven’t really wanted to put into words yet.
It was college, wasn’t it?
I outgrew you, but that isn’t the worst part. Even worse is the fact that you didn’t. And I get to go through every single day pretending to still be someone I clearly left at home in the box labeled ‘not needed anymore’.
When did our shared memories that brought me so much comfort suddenly turn into long forgotten relics of a past life?
An inside joke we shared about saying “goofnight” instead of “goodnight” has now turned into a task I have to perform every time the clock strikes 12 because I can’t hurt your feelings by revealing that the fact is I now find it mind numbingly repetitive as well as stunningly boring.
And this is so unfair to you. I know. I won’t even let you in on the fact that I no longer am the same person you knew, yet I expect you to change your demeanor around me.
I’m scared. Scared to hurt you. Scared you will think of me as a fraud. Scared you will judge me for altering myself. But the thing I’m most scared of is that you might accept me wholeheartedly and I still wouldn’t want to reply to your texts.
I wish our dynamic hadn’t changed and I wish I could still call you up any time of day to moan about the same guy over and over again. But I can’t. The guy isn’t the same anymore. And neither am I.
There’s nothing to do except accept that I don’t have to feel guilty for going on a different path than what I’d originally planned on taking. It’s okay if I don’t find our conversations riveting anymore. The polaroid of you with a foam mustache is never coming down from my dorm room wall. It’s okay if I don’t find your jokes funny anymore. The stories I tell about us will never fail to elicit laughter from my friends here. It’s okay.
Tennessee Williams once said, “Time doesn’t take away from friendship, nor does separation.” And I choose to believe that. Yes, we may not be the best of friends anymore, but I’ll always cherish us, what you gave me and what you have made me.
Just because we grew up together, doesn’t mean we can’t grow apart.
“Haa, lekin kuch hi din ke liye toh milna mushkil hai.”