Moving On — A year without your Best Friend of 20 plus years !
Moving On — A year without your Best Friend of 20 plus years !
Over the last year, I have lost many friends. Friends that were so deeply entwined to me as a person. I have seen friends come and go, stay for a while - until my necessity in their life runs out and then make an emergency exit. Never to be seen again.
Three to four hour Marathon calls when they were drunk, too high to care, too depressed to get and too happy to care about me. I have held the line open to talk, to listen without judgement.
Calls before the exam, staying at my home prior to dangerous subjects, when my passing was in doubt too, I have let them in and studied together.
Calls before an entrance exam, they hyperventilating and suffering panic attacks, consoling them to normalcy. Half dead and half asleep myself, I have been their angel in their distress.
Staying together as friends until they sort of found love.
The common factor has been dis-ownment after their work was done. I sort of understood after sometime and they have been ex-communicated from my life.
But this one friend, our friendship was born out of no reason at all. They say a friend for seven years, stays a friend for ever. This man was a friend for almost 24 years and yet as I write this article, I celebrate a year without his friendship. It pained me that a man could drop out of my life as fast as he did.
To this day, I have no clue as to why he left all of a sudden. He stopped picking my calls, stopped responding to my messages. I even called up his landline number, he picked up and pretended to be someone else and hung up saying it was a wrong number. I was perplexed, I had known him for ages. We were so close that he could predict everything I did and may be to an extent vice versa. He came home every weekend, almost every weekend and we played cricket, badminton and we spoke at length. If I wanted a partner for a boring job, his name was the first on my list and vice versa.
In school, we sat next to each other, we walked to school together, we came in the same van before that. I had known him right since I was in Kindergarten. We were Laurel and Hardy, if I was around, he was bound to be near. He was always better than me at practical things, such as playing cricket, badminton and maybe driving the automobiles too. I had an acute shortage in driving skills and we travelled to office together for almost a year and a half. In school we had designed a missed call system to tell each other to start to school. Staying three roads apart, without our own cell phones, we had managed to connect. But today, I have a phone and he has one too. We have drifted apart with such a natural rhythm that it sort of scares me.
I did reach out to him again and again in the last year, curious to find out if he was still in town and the reason why he was suddenly like Houdini. After almost months of calling, I decided to call from another number and prank him. In my mind, I assumed he’ll see through the prank and recognise my voice. After almost fifteen minutes, I did the revelation, happy that I had pranked him fair and square. He then told me that I had told something about him to someone and this had gravely offended him. I had no memory of when he was a topic of conversation. I speak too much and that too with too many people, it came as a shock to me that my words had reached him from someone else and it had hurt him. I wanted to know why, what and how this had transpired.
He did not budge at all. You have spoken, you should know. I asked him to meet and he did not agree to come to our normal place of meeting. I was now angry at him for being an absolute madman. If I was in the wrong, I needed to know why and how. I would gladly apologise and make amends with him. He should know that by now. We had had a normal conversation a month back on my birthday. He had come over and we had spoken at length, just like normal.
I cut the call and ended this conversation in a fit of anger. I would not go back to this friendship.
It may have been ego or anger or hurt feelings or just plain rejection from a friend who did not even want to speak as to why he thought I had messed up. Not after knowing me for 20 plus years.
It redefined my view of friendship entirely. This month marks a year since we went our separate ways and I have made peace with his absence. He has deleted my contact number. I still have his. I did not call him on his birthday. I could not take it that he may not pick up the call. Knowing him, he would not. I had to respect his wishes and stay away.
This outburst of emotion has waited for a year to be vomited out into the world. It is a lesson for you, that maybe your friendships that have been perfect for years, relations that have taken years of building and nurturing can fail and fall flat on its face and you may never know what hit you.
I have always had too many friends and them leaving or not respecting my time and values has been normal. But this man, I have to say - I used to miss him. But not anymore and I am tired of answering questions as to how my ex-best friend from 20 plus years is doing. If you ever get to meet him, tell him I have moved on...
