Meeting old friends
No, this is not about friends getting old; I'm too young to experience that.
This is about friends who were little kids at some point in their lives, have grown up, and are all leading their separate lives.
I’ve been meeting a lot of my school friends lately. One fine day, I went to meet my classmate of the 5th grade. On another occasion, I met my Delhi school friends I last saw in the 10th grade. I went on a trip with my friends, who I used to hang out with till the 12th grade.
I’ll try to sum up some common observations that I had when meeting these chaddi buddies:
- You have a strange sense of familiarity meeting them. There’s almost no ice to break, and you resume right where you left off.
- This may be because they know you from your old anecdotes and memories. They repeat it in front of you like an annoying horn but with an added zing of some sentimental value. Mind you, good things about you are never talked about, and neither they should be.
- This makes you behave like a kid around them -- like that 14-year-old you who knew nothing about this world and wasn’t nearly as refined as he might be today. That keeps you grounded and makes you realise how far you have come.
- In your never-ending conversations, you rapidly switch between the past and the present. You talk about the people you’ve lost touch with and how inevitable it all was. While you feel good about letting go of some people in your lives, you have an added curiosity of getting in touch and knowing more about the people you genuinely admire.
- Childhood impressions are lasting. Even if you’ve taken a 180 from the personality you previously had, your friends will try to find similarities between your old self and the new one and will try to expose the inner child inside you as much as possible.
- You’ll also have a ton of fun hanging out with people who weren’t necessarily your favourite back then. You’ll hug them, laugh with them, look at them with awe and promise yourself to be in touch with them.
- While saying bye to them, you realise how you’ll probably end up settling in different corners of the world and will see less of each other as time passes. That will leave you with a weird feeling.
- When going back, you remind yourself to check in on your old friends every once in a while. You realise what you have between each other (trust, rapport, sense of humour, shared pains, and whatnot) is invaluable, and in a world mired with suspicion and trustless solutions, is impossible to find.
So yeah, meeting old friends can be hard, but meeting them is so worth the effort! It’s the intellectual equivalent of climbing on top of a hill and looking down at the beautiful landscape that was once right under your feet.
A beautiful view atop the Savandurga Hill. I'm not uploading my friends' photos here lol