Five Years Since

Its five years since graduation. Five long years, since we walked into the real world. I look back with awe at all the years gone by. We start off with dreams, almost everyone does. Just out of college and you are ready to take on the world, or so you think. You are looking for a story, an awesome incredible story that you can write and call your own. There is naïvete in the way we perceive life to be, in the hope, in the promises we hope to keep.

There is a longing to be together. The tears are fresh, and so is the pain of separation. We haven’t hardened to those ideas yet. We believe miles are only numbers. We keep in touch. We write love notes on walls and pledge together forever.

Slowly that flame withers, and life takes over. Some of us toe the line, get a job, get settled, get married; the others still wander, searching for forever. Then you chance across a photograph, a video, an anecdote, that friend you bump into the café, that autographed t-shirt stashed in a long forgotten corner, a boxful of bills and labels, a magazine, a notebook with scribbles and before you realise, you are walking back in time.

You wonder if you would have been any different, if all those people hadn’t walked in your life then. You wonder how the people you couldn’t stand with are the people you talk with the most. You wonder how you split with your chummies, or how distance has crawled and you don’t have track of people. You remember the promise of facebook, the groups and the communities, and the empty virtual spaces that they are now. But still nostalgia hits as strong as ever. And you’d probably jump with joy even if you bumped into that guy on the last bench whom you never ever spoke with.

There is no ruffled hair, and loose shirts, no overgrown beards and bushy eyebrows. You wonder how that girl who gave a damn about how she looked now dons makeup and prim hair. And that guy, who everybody laughed at, is a cool hunk with a bike.

Appearances change. Circumstances change. But you know if you look closely, you will find that scrawny teenager in a safebox close to the heart. Undergrad always remains a bitter-sweet love story.

This one’s for you Engicos, for the memories, and the strings that wind us all together to a haven, on a tiny hillock in a god-forbidden place, called GEC.