03/08/2020
Do you remember those friendships that you took for granted, or those that carried with them promises of forever? It could be with anyone - your schoolmates, neighbour's kid, your own sibling, or the kids you met in the park every evening. Looking back at those days make them seem like a different life altogether, isn't it?
At each stage in life, as we meet new people, we make promises to them - promises of forever. When we are sixteen and we fall in love for the first time, we plan our wedding along with these friends. Some of us plan to get married in the same year and same city so that we can stay together. Forever. In college, we make promises to keep in touch and meet each other in few years, no matter where in the world we are. Then life happens, we drift apart, we make more friends, and make more promises. We grow up, and adult life gives hardly any time for ourselves, so that we can always tell those people we made promises to that we aren't available, that life is too busy.
Aditi has always been an extrovert, and she loved the idea of changing cities and making new friends - the more people she gets to know, the better. Amit is more comfortable being in his shell, and has counted only his sister as his best friend since childhood. He didn't really care for including other people in his life. But they grew up, and Aditi found others, while Amit was left on his own. This happened without Aditi's knowing, because she continued being herself, letting many people enter her life and climb up her priority list. And Amit accepted it, while being there for Aditi nonetheless.
Many of us are Aditis, and many are Amits. But there is this sense of acceptance that comes with age, of the fact that people will drift away, and our best friends at one point will definitely have new people in their life, whether we like it or not. Only very few people get to hang out with the same friend after ten or twenty years.