Throwback: Imaginarium

Written August 27, 2010 

Apparently, there are people on this earth who call up their mothers after an argument to make sure they (the mothers) sleep okay. 🤷🏾‍♀️

Oh, and by the way, did you know that people are actually very nervous about being left alone? I mean, if you look closely, you will notice that nobody actually does anything alone, of their own free will. They're always surrounded by friends, and if they even need to go to the loo, they drag a friend along. This is especially true of girls.

If they're, for some strange reason, not with friends, they try to strike up conversations with people who they don't really talk to much. OR, and this is even better, they start fiddling with their phone. Check out the relaxed shoulders, the way someone leans back casually when they're on their phone. They don't mind that they're physically alone, because they're connected.

The word connected, by the way, is The Word these days. It's all about social networking, and keeping in touch which essentially refers to the fact that you know when someone you knew for a couple of months on some summer camp three something years ago is now married to another counselor from the same camp and has a kid now.

You're probably wondering why I'm mentioning all this. It's because (a) I need to prove my point and because (b) I was left stunned after this particular piece of information and needed to share (another of those social networking words). It's hard to digest the fact that life could have moved on so much - that so much could have changed. Because our memories are like the caches on the internet. You take a photograph of a place, or a time, and expect it never to change. Never once realizing that just as you're having to move on, other people do too.

But then, that's something I learned the hard way.

If nothing else, life over the last two years taught me to handle life itself. It taught me that shit happens, but once you face it and get over with it, you get a reprieve for around two weeks.

After which, of course, shit happens again.

I also learnt that if you leave someplace, things change. And while you're away, it feels like a million years of tapas all rolled into one, and there's this deep longing for it all to go back to how it was. You feel frustrated because the things you knew so well, and people you felt were close to you all seem so far away, so distant and indifferent. You feel left out because by rights, you still belong there!

And trying to live vicariously the life you would have lived in an alternate universe only makes you miss out on the life you're leading now. You never realize that there are things happening in the here and now that are actually fun, if only you'd stop craning your neck towards the past and making believe that you're living in the present tense.

But hey, instead, take a deep breath and close your eyes. Wait patiently till you can go back. Guess what? It's like you never left, and nothing ever happened in between. It's all the same.

This is actually a philosophy I developed while engaged in the endless activity of writing in ''autograph books". This, for the uninitiated, is a practice that rolls around at the end of a year, and the outgoing batch all present to you their autograph books so that you may enshrine forever the precious memories you have shared (or not shared, as the case may be) with them in those pages. It's a real pain when you barely know people and they still expect you to fill six or seven pages. And there'll be this stack of books sitting on your desk, and you're writing in one, and then you go and get a bite to eat and come back, and I swear to you that the stack will be higher. They seem to breed in there or something.

To get back to my point, it's repetitive, writing in all those books of people you barely know, and who are going to remember you by what you've written down there. So by default, you develop some sort of signature piece, which you then proceed to Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V into every book. And this was mine:

Even if we've spent one hour doing something together and enjoying each other's company, that is enough. Even a single moment of friendship is enshrined in Memory, and makes us special. Even a subtle smile, or an inside joke- a bonding that lasted for a minute, will last forever. Which is why you're important to me, and which is why I will remember you forever.

And this pretty much sums up my view on friendship. And this is why, at any moment of any day (or even any night, unless it's project submission night) you can call on me, and expect me to be there for you. It doesn't matter that we've talked a lot, or not at all. As long as we have something to connect us, however frail that link might be, I'll be there for you. And sometimes, for me, just the fact that you thought to call on me is enough, though we're complete strangers to each other.

For some reason (quite probably because I was watching back to back F.R.I.E.N.D.S. episodes) this Phoebe quote is floating through my head:

"Oh, I know. It's been so long since you've had sex that you're wondering if they've changed it."

Doesn't that kind of sum up today's Nature Ramble through the wilderness of my head? So cute.

Oh, and I regret to inform you guys that today's toast has been cancelled due to too much alcohol in my week already.