Okay so I am back home. I have been back home and life has been moving fast. Too fast. Sister dearest moved countries; I got typhoid; my anxiety has been acting up; I have the worst writers block and honestly, I am just all over the place. I’ll be fine, don’t worry love. But look, it is the 30th of the month and I do not wish to break my streak so here is a rant from April’s archives.

Bear with me because I know nostalgia is an omnipresent feeling!

I just went back home for the first time since all my friends left for university.

My life has taken rather weird and unusual turns in comparison to all my childhood friends. When they were all chilling post tuitions and coaching classes, I was still in school because I shifted to an IB school from our beloved CBSE. When they were applying to colleges, I was interning at random places because I took a gap year. When I moved away from home for work, they were still waiting for offline classes to start.

We have all been on different trajectories for a while now but every time I visited home, my sweet friends would planned evenings with me and they would skip online lectures for me.

Until now.

This time when I went home, almost all of them were out of town. Some in Bombay, some in Canada and some in the States. The few who were closer and could visit did so.
But our schedules were so tight that we had to plan the days to fit in seeing each other for even an hour. I couldn’t meet a friend even though she was home because when I was available, she wasn’t and vice versa.

When we were younger, we would plan meet-ups days prior too. Not because we had to add it to our busy calendars but because we had to convince the cool mom to host so that we could order pizzas; because we had to set up the perfect route for our carpooling so that we didn’t have to beg all our parents to drive us there; because we had to choose the movie to be rented that we would all watch once all the class gossip and games were over.

Funny how most of us are surviving on takeouts away from home now and thus yearn for home-cooked meals; funny how we drive cars ourselves now but have nowhere to go; funny how we have Netflix accounts and so much gossip but no time to cover it all because giving life updates takes up all the little time we have.

Things have gotten so surreal and fast and difficult that it is in moments of solidarity in your childhood home when you realize- shit we grew up!

Each wall has a silly story to tell;
Ahhh Pratha would eat her butter masti sitting in that corner,
And Dax would fight Kairavi to sit on that sofa,
Rudra and Simar would always brag that Manjalpur is way more developed than Gotri
You would find Vidhi gossiping with mumma at the dining table
And Nain would always want to go out for a ride
While Priyanshi and Sahil would quarrel about something stupid throughout.

We grew up;
So quick, so fast,
And I would like to believe- so well too
But because we had to, no?

Time waits for no one
And even though we thought we had time,
We have all grown up
And I sit here at work and wonder how will life unfold for all of us
As more time passes by

I fear time.

Don’t we all?