no expiration on otherside...

Every once in a while, Google Facts keeps retweeting, “If friendship lasts longer than seven years, then it will last a lifetime.” Huffington Post even published a scribble called The Seven Year Expatriation Date on Friendships years ago. It’s a fascinating and scary thought, no I won’t honour the tweet with the term fact. Though its backed by herd of psychologist, to me it’s an idea which can be stretched and contracted according to each individual.

Again I keep reading about phony lives we project on our virtual world. Some of us have thousand friends to list, apparently none to talk. We pretend to care on screen but don’t bother to even check in reality. We are connected but not close. And articles after articles I read how much people are worried that true essence of friendship is getting lost. Apparently friendship of Millennials are dying pre-mature death compared to friendships from Gen X! These are overused arguments that I am bored of reading and listening. Every time I see a tendency among people to idealize, compare and put things under glorious better past, I stop caring or reading about their thoughts.

Two of my friends were worried after reading about the seven-year expiry research. The idea of not being in touch with someone you almost shared your undergarments with, is morbid. Do I console them? Nope! My greatest friendships have already crossed fourteen-year bench mark years ago and my ladies are here to stay without exchanging a single bra. My gents, they have been a constant too, if not serving the life imprisonment sentence, they have been paying road taxes.

Another classmate had sent a picture comparing childhood and adulthood. It said in childhood we had twenty best friends but once we are an adult, we have one best friend, and we eventually lose them because life separates our path. No one can argue the logic and reality of that picture. But there is a big ‘But’ which itches my brain. 'But' why do we hanker after what’s gone and why do we worry about the expiry date of friendship. Why give so much thought to, what will not be there?

Now that I have post graduated, I have to constantly hear that, most of us will be out of touch with our batch-mates, since some of us have got jobs, some are moving to different part of the country others are going back home. I can see my schoolmates crying on social media about graduation and asking their college-mates to stay in touch. While another fellow has been writing farewell poetry to his peers. I can see everyone is afraid of being left alone, uncared and forgotten. Its normal to have these fears, we all have this fear, but I can also see a tendency that people will miss their chance to brag, show off and smirk about their achievements. It’s a two-way process. And to be depressed about this sudden vacancy is foolish, I won’t sugarcoat. It’s foolish to think that just because one person cared for another for a time period they were together, she would be constantly in touch with you after distance comes in between both. Or to think that the peer group one had for four years would last for forty years. People come and go, friends we were close with once, will find other close friends, we will be replaced by others and others will replace them. Don’t our years of education say that? Nothing is permanent. Friendship my dear imaginary reader friends, is as transitory as life. It eventually ends.   

Like medicines friendships will expire too, but one point in our life friendship preserved us like the medicine cured us. Yet once we are cured we don't consume the medicine for sake of attachment, but we do keep it inside pillbox in hope of a security for future calamity. Friendship is also in its core is a process of give and take, forcing a perverted value system based on emotion and expecting it to last a century is offensive. 

Should we not just be happy, in this moment we had a friend who was not pouting in front of selfie stick but actually talking to us on phone or sharing a glass of beer? And wont it be great years later to say, there was a person who was dear to me, though we are not close anymore I hope they are happy now, than crying I had a dear friend once, who left me alone and sad, he left me because I was too hooked on the idea of being best friends forever!

P.S- I have no attachments to lamentations. 

thanking you to bear with me

paulOaries