Growing Apart

Losing a friend is like losing family. It hurts in the beginning, rips your heart through as if it were a break up. Except that with a friend, it is never a true break up. You still call each other up – in the beginning it’s a habit, then it is out of some kind of nostalgia, after which you grab the instances when you still see a ray of hope, and eventually, things turn formal and stiff. That is when you know you have lost a friend, that is when first it hurts and then you just learn to get along your way without the ‘best friend’.

Somewhere between growing up and getting married, having a kid and running a house, I lost one very close friend.  She once told me that a best friend is a really childish concept and that as we grow older, we should understand that. I think it was a very polite way of telling me that we were done.  But I think the concept of a best friend doesn’t grow old as we do. 

I am a big believer in having a rock solid pillar of support. I would like to imagine I can be that to someone too. In this case, I may have faltered as much as she. But I still feel a twinge of sadness every time I see a fleeting activity on facebook, I feel a twinge of anger when I don’t quite understand what happened, I still feel a twinge of envy when I see another friend from college bond much more with her and advertise that fact quite often on a public forum. And I hate that I actually measure my words and think about what I am saying when I talk to her.  I miss my best friend but with a kind of latent anger that I don’t understand myself. 

I see these pairs of women - everywhere – on television and movies, in books and in coffee shops, in weddings and in conversations. I see them amongst people I know. I spot the sheer comfort they share, the way their lives are open to each other, the fact that there is no need to hide and project. And I miss having that. 

No, I don’t think one can entirely blame a marriage that changed a life, or a city one shifted out of, or a baby being born. Best friends stick together – that is what they are supposed to do – it’s a part of the job description. And me – the eternal sucker for this best friend business – I am just grateful that my closest school friend and I are still the same – I am just happy that I wasn’t careless enough to let go of old friends to make new ones. 

I like a few things about myself and one of them is loyalty – I still have a bunch of shining stars in my own little personal sky and I haven’t lost touch because I temporarily lost a number or missed out on a phase of someone’s life. I am incredible lucky to carry forward these friends with me from each phase of my life – school, college, workplace and my second masters. But I am also immensely sad that one of the brightest stars faded out. 

But sometimes losing a friend is a learning lesson – it teaches you to let go. Sometimes it’s a hopefully hopeless juncture – you hope things will be the same though you know they won’t. Sometimes it’s a lesson in self improvement – you will bitch about it because it is cathartic and then you will feel like shit about it and promise not to do it again. And sometimes it is just what it is – it is a realization that it wasn’t that strong in the first place. 

Growing apart is an excuse. Yes, it happens. But it shouldn’t happen.  And if it has happened then it isn’t called growing apart, it is a heart wrenchingly sad break-up, it’s like losing a part of your family. It happens, yes – but we learn to live with it. 

Pregnant Confessions

Another one of those series-of-unfortunate-events day and I don’t know what else to do but vent here. So this has become that anyway – a dead, stagnant remnant of what used to be a blog, a link whose address I still like too much to give up, a place I still prefer, on some days, to revisit, to know how I felt once upon a time. And then on rare days like these, when even calling a close friend and cribbing seems to be so much more of an effort (and who wants to hear so much complaining anyway), then this is my only outlet for unadulterated bitching.

But to begin with, some background, and some information that deserves a happy paragraph before the seething in anger begins. I am going through what I think is one of the most difficult yet fascinating experiences of my life – pregnancy. Yes, it happened and it’s been a while and I am a healthy mixture of confused, happy, anxious and what not. Apart from having major body issues initially, and seeing the once flat stomach convex itself out in the last almost 7 months, the feeling of another being inside you is not quite explicable. It is like you are never alone – no really – think about it! And hell, I haven’t been so detoxified since I was 18.

Initially it’s just something that seems to happen on the white stick with two pink lines, followed by a paper prescription and a bit of paranoia from the parents with their list of dos and don’ts. On some days, when you feel nauseated and sick, it just seems like a day of bad indigestion. On other days, you tend to completely forget that you have another life inside of you. On those days I have almost had an x-ray, climbed a jittery ladder, driven recklessly and craved a drink. On other days, things are really quite the usual – the daily routine, the reading, cooking, driving, watching mindless television. And then in a few months, when you outgrow your clothes, it only just begins to sink in. What really hit the fact home that I am going to be a mom is the kicking. Well, honestly, initially I didn’t understand what it was – strange bubble like movements begin and I thought I was going to have a bout of really bad diarrhea but then that didn’t happen and these tiny movements continued. And then I realized that the baby is busy with some serious acrobatics in there. And now the stage is well beyond that, now she/he makes her/his presence felt regularly, getting over excited in my literary theory classes! You go kid – go kick the shit out of that insane Freud who calls pregnancy penis envy that got me a deluge of funny messages in class.

But all said and done, with the speculation on the gender, the googling of the names, the scouting for larger clothes and the scary escalation on the weighing machine, I am not sure if I am quite so ready for it yet. Pregnancy is not pretty, like motherhood isn’t supposed to be easy. Things which are tough to deal with are mostly over glorified in the world. It may be beautiful but it has its share of ugly and that what makes it exciting as well as scary, sort of like a monster roller coaster ride. But a friend recently told me that she thinks I will be a good mom, I have the nurturing instinct for others if maybe not so much for myself. I like how infrequently we meet yet how profoundly she sometimes understands me. She will be a kick-ass aunt to my kid, however infrequently she does get to see her/him.

However, getting back to today and to the general flavor of the recent days, I am going through helper-horror at home. With both the cleaner and the cook being on leave, I am having to make do with two incredible incompetent, slow replacements. In normal circumstances that wouldn’t be a problem but with me soon becoming a teapot and with my final semester exams looming over me like some sort of a bad omen, I am cantankerous all day. What really helps me is going to college, meeting these bunch of fantastic friends that I have made who make me feel happy again, and sitting for some fun classes where I get picked on for saying that the text has demonized the mother figure, and the ending the day with a long long lecture on Julia Kristeva which makes my day.

But today I didn’t have to go to college, and in an attempt to study for the exam, I woke up early, only to be rudely welcomed by this loud noise coming from the neighbor’s house. I waited for a few hours, hoping that it would die down but the continuous dham-dham-tak-tak-tong-tong didn’t stop. At 7.15 in the evening – yes after 12 hours of mind numbing noise and a half failed attempt to finish reading Marquez, when I finally did tell her that the noise should stop as per society regulation of 7 PM, and that I have my exam and its very disturbing, the dumb bitch told me that it will go on for another 2 weeks. Ugh. I could kill the retarded toad right there, she with her loud Punjabi way of articulating everything via yelling, and her really strange 19 year old daughter who hasn’t been able to adjust in a hostel for a year now, because of whom they have actually rented a weekend flat in another town where the toad goes to so that she doesn’t get homesick. I mean really – I went to a hostel at 8 – who behaves like that at 19. I only knew that my neighbors were complete unsocial loud fools, now I think they are a bunch of really dysfunctional people who have some creepy family secrets stashed in their closed home and locked cupboards. Bloody inconsiderate family of ugly nincompoops.

I will not attribute my annoyance to my pregnancy though. The hormones making a woman crazy was a theory I never bought anyway. I never did blame a bad mood on pms neither did I ever hanker for extra attention during pregnancy like they show in those retarded tata sky ads where the woman wants to watch some movie scene at some ungodly hour. No, women are not crazy, only these myths and advertisements and movies seem to promote this kind of hysterical behavior. I think these are days which are testing my patience, maybe a tiny rehearsal for the sleepless nights to come, maybe an indication that I have a very low threshold for any kind of pain, physical or mental, and that I have a very low level of tolerance.

But all said and done, I do get all teary eyes when I see a video with a new born squirming in sleep, or when I see a baby in the colony, smiling at random people, unaware of what miseries adulthood brings. I like seeing the sheer innocence and sometimes even stupidity that do make children so endearing. Having my own little smiling-crying-yelling monster to tame would be fun. All I hope for now is that the love does overflow from the moment I see her/him, but that’s another 10 weeks to go and who knows, the Maa in me might just surface well on time.

For now, it’s worrying about exams that keeps me occupied, reading Joyce keeps me intrigued, imagining how my first drunk day will be after this dry spell keeps me excited, and once in a while, a really strong kick, does make me smile.