Dear Best Friend,
As I write to you today, after delaying for so long, I am searching for the million words I had in my mind; words and thoughts I had to share with you. I am searching for the emotions and the ideas; the same emotions and ideas that wanted me to write to you because I failed to express them. As I falter in an ocean of feelings, relying on my capsizing emotions, I am given to perplexity and heartbreak. I could say a thousand words, and yet I wouldn’t. Partly because of my fear that having said these words to you would leave me wordless in this turbulence, and everything that reminds me of this finality; of this end.
Somehow, from a very remote idea of formality and airy pretensions, we blended into this solidarity. All about the senior-junior dynamics- the courtesy of conduct and the sense of staunch ‘devotion’- we were, all as juniors are, fed with these ideas of behaving with seniors. Notwithstanding all these regulations, the edict of our relationship has seen us becoming entirely friendly and in that, immensely devoted to each other, informedly and out of concern more than courtesy. Can I possibly thank you for being so annoyingly understanding, frustratingly mature, and hopelessly loving? Having established my incapacity at gratitude, how can I ever possibly say anything in mere words? I am flustered today, because there is so much to say, but there is not enough time.
Characteristically varying and settled in the spectrums of extremisms, we came to find a part of us in each other. Home away from home, a safe place, humanising the objects of oppression and love, you have been an absolutely delightful friend. An uncanny familiarity has it been that inspired such confidence in each other. How this loss of a home renders me bereft of the warmth and the comfort and the joy of a haven. All this time, I am sure has been for always. Knowing that this would last forever is no consolation at all, because I know better that that.
To an endless flow of gossips, radical discussions on literature and life, and the countless conspiracy theories and crises, there must be an end. And so it comes to an end, this endless joy. This joy, the acknowledgement of which was only ever multiplied by the constant sorrows that we lived through. I could say this and much more in a thousand words, but what’s more than saying that I would do it all over again with you? But I guess this is all the time we had; simply because we are all too familiar with broken promises made in faith. I wish you everything best in the world that awaits you. And I want you to know, that great things await you.
It would pain me to lose you to time. In fact, I might be losing you even now. Strangely, I knew you would go away, but I never feared I would lose you, and that kept me going. Fading away is only natural, but maybe we will not fade away so easily. Maybe in this parting, there is something more becoming. This reminds of a quote from Frodo Baggins at the end of The Return of The King, “How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand… there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend.”
Even if time draws people apart, it truly is something I expect will not affect us.
I think we will be fine, after all, so long as we are a ‘we’.
Feature Image Credits: DU Beat archives
Kartik Chauhan
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