It's Weird....

You know what’s sad…

That awkward gap that follows your conversation when you are talking to someone who was your buddy at one point of time… but you lost contact for some reason or the other… and normally you never used to have such a problem as to searching for topics to talk… in fact it used to be like you never ran out of topics… now suddenly… it’s like you guys are meeting up for the first time and then you have exhausted your initial rounds of talk and waiting for the other person to speak up…

Happened with me very recently… I was talking to this friend of mine from college and it was quite a long time since we chatted up or even called up to enquire each others’ whereabouts… fair enough.. life had taken different turns in the span of a year or so and stuff had happened in our lives which changed priorities… keeping in touch did take a backseat but it was not as though the step was taken backward by just one of us… it was a two-way street and well we both did not keep in touch… we used to hang out a lot in college and had the same set of friends… our wavelengths were the same and we had a good time in college like any gang does! Then we passed out, settled into jobs, and the circles/gang changed… Other priorities came up and somehow keeping in touch/calling up/sms-ing /mailing/scrapping in orkut took a backseat. I had my own set of problems to handle and I guess she hers!

I called her up recently again to discuss a mutual friends’ wedding! And also to catch up with her… Every 2 sentences down the conversation, there was this weird pause… a vacuum that both of us found it difficult to fill… a gap that had widened… I somehow could no longer relate to whatever she was saying about her life there… not that I had an entirely different lifestyle… she still hung out with friends from back in college… while I; I no longer had that privilege… Instead, I had made new friends… and I could barely talk to her about them for fear that she would not be interested..

There was no rift or anything… no fights or stuff like that but still … the gap was there! And it is widening day-by-day…

I do not feel too happy about it but there is nothing that I can do about it because now it has gone to a point where sometimes I feel I do not care! I know I am being selfish/arrogant when I say that… But that’s the reality now! It was not like I lost my Best Friend. But I did lose friends all through my life at some point or other due to some incidents or other… but for most it has been only due to the failure of not keeping in touch… and for that I purely take the blame...

Am I going to take up the initiative to keep in touch with them… with some of them I guess I will... but with others I am not too sure… our lives have diverged so much that it does not make sense to go back holding out the branch of friendship….

But that awkward pause still pricks!!