Memories…

Let me just start with a disclaimer that I am not a sentimental person. For a very short while in my early twenties, I thought I was but I can now safely say that those days are behind me. I don’t know what label you can give to a person like me now, but I am now someone who enjoys the moment in the Now without wanting to do anything else with it. Every relationship I get into, I take it with a pinch of detachment, yet being attached to it. I work on it with a full heart, but I know that nothing is permanent, or I keep telling myself that, so I don’t fall in love with the moment. I have stopped falling in love with ‘things’. Am trying to not be in love with people also, but then, we all know that never happens. Self-preservation or cynicism, call it whatever you want!

That said, the above two objects mean a lot to me. They both remind me of two once-very-important people, both of whom I don’t talk to anymore. I have not lost a lot of friends over these years, in fact very few. Most of them have just fallen out of touch, and I know I can pick up the thread from where we both dropped it. Some of them have fallen out of touch with willingness from both sides, we just weren’t meant to be. But there have been just a few whom I can never pick up the thread with, with whom I might never get back in touch. Such are the ways life has transpired between us. And no, I don’t pine for them, I don’t even think of them… Not consciously at least, as I just recently noticed.  I thought I’ve taken ‘letting go’ to be an almost-art-form.

In spite of not being in love with things, I have a couple of them along with my house keys. These are objects belonging to places or people that mean a lot of me. [See the difference? These are about people/places, the above two are just objects :-)]

I have had this Eiffel Tower as a part of that lot for more than a decade now. I haven’t been to Paris, yet… The Eiffel Tower was a gift by a friend, who has also not been there , but got it from another friend who gave us both two copies of this. This was a very good friend, someone who had a constant presence in my teenage years in everything I/we did. I put up this charm in my key chain, because that’s what 18 yr olds do. They show-off their friendship to the world with gestures like this, we both had the key chain, spoke about travelling to Paris and the world, and doing many other such things together in life, shared stories about crushes, gushed like kids about the dreams we had for life. Somewhere along, we drifted apart, and this person betrayed my trust. I won’t go into the gory details of what happened after this betrayal, but lets just say that it is/was irreparable. And no, I don’t think we could be friends even if I tried getting back with this person, we were growing up to be different people even back then.

The Eiffel Tower charm just stayed in my key chain. For 15 long years! Till I noticed last week that my key chain was heavy and set about to clear out things that I couldn’t feel about anymore. I just couldn’t find a single feeling for this person in my heart and boom… it got out!

The other object in the pic is a small doll made out of a chocolate wrapper. You fold the chocolate/toffee wrapper like pleats, and knot it to make a head, and lo, the wrapper looks like a doll with a gown. As a kid, I loved this, when any adult made this for me, but could never figure out how to make it myself. Till one day, a friend showed it to me step by step. It was super simple, and I made it with every chocolate/toffee I ate thereafter. And I thought of this friend every time I made it. This was a very dear person, but I guess becoming adults was hard on both of us, and we couldn’t keep track of keeping the friendship alive. Except for a one-off conversation over the past decade, there hasn’t been much to keep us going, because we were in different places in our respective lives. We probably could become friends or acquaintances in future, but I don’t see the feasibility for this happening , at least now. And I guess, we both are good with that.

But the habit to make dolls out of wrappers clung to me , over the past 15 years, since I’ve known this person, I’ve thought of this person every time I made it, albeit for a fleeting second, devoid of emotion. I did this with Eclairs wrappers, Ghirardelli ones looked the best, and Dairy Milk wrappers were too big. Till last week, when I realized that I was doing this. Well, I was sending good wishes to this person whenever I made this, and it was happening without me noticing it. I don’t intend to stop it, but I don’t think I can do this for a long time , especially since it was happening subconsciously.

As am thinking how to end this point, I realized there is no proper way to end this. These were just two random thoughts on a random weekend, and I had to write them somewhere, so that this space in my brain gets cleared up :-)