Today marks eight years since she stopped at my desk and asked, “Is this seat taken?” What began as a simple conversation, ended up being something far greater. We evolved from two students in a new class, to two people who’ve been through everything with each other, quite literally.
When I met her, I was a studious goody-two-shoes, who raised her hands to ask for permission to use the washroom, and submitted her completed homework on time, without asking for any extensions. Meanwhile, she was the one who conducted water fights during school hours and forgot to get her drawing notebooks for class: the type I had been warned to stay away from. And there she stood, asking this intimidated girl if she could sit beside her. Truly, this is the story of when the eye of the storm met the calm of the sea.
In those early days, I remember trying to stay away from the group of rowdy girls, whose mission in life was probably to disrupt the class in any and all possible ways. She was from the group of the back-benchers; I was from the group who cried over losing one mark in a cyclic test. Therefore, in a nutshell, that was us: two most unlikely people to be friends. The only reason we even greeted each other was probably because we were sitting next to each other, and ignoring would be on another level of rudeness.
We represented two extremes of the spectrum of students. And somehow, we completed each other to make us what we are today. She taught me the longer route to get to a class, so that we can miss the first two minutes of lecture; I reminded her to get the right notebooks for class, so that she wouldn’t be punished; she taught me how to tactically to go the washroom right after her, so that we could cheat in tests; I taught her that it was wrong to cheat it tests. I still don’t understand the adrenaline rush we got in timing our washroom breaks just to say ‘hi’. Totally pointless with very high stakes, and yet I would do it all over again.
I left my old friends, because they found her to be a bad influence; she left her old friends, because they found me to be a bad influence. To my friends, she was the one because of whom people from groups other than mine were talking to me; to her friends, I was the one because of whom she was missing out on their fun times of throwing wet toilet-papers up, such that they would stick to the ceiling of the washroom, and fall down on an unsuspecting victim later. Little did they know, that while I was making sure she did her homework, she was making sure I went out to play with her in the evenings. Both of us had become a team.
Fast-forward to three years later, when she had to shift out of the country, but even long distance could not tear us apart. Yes, so we were no longer spending the entire day with each other, but that didn’t mean that we wouldn’t involve the other in all our milestones and minor difficulties. Even though we were apart for four years, whenever she would come to visit, it felt like nothing had changed. I remember when she was here during my tenth standard board exams (perks of doing two different boards, such that the exam months differed), and I would first go over to her place to rant about my exam, and then go to my house. I also remember how she was in town during my twelfth standard board exams, and had me blocked from her social media accounts, so that she won’t disturb or distract me. Ultimately, she did come down to my school on the last day of my examinations, for the best surprise of those four years, after which we sat down with a highly detailed plan of how to spend that week before she would have to fly off again.
Fast-forward to us planning out our admissions into college, such that we would finally be able to stay, at least in the same country, together. It was our way of taking revenge for the four years apart by planning our four years of college life together. We evolved together from sitting together for lunch in sixth grade, to sitting together for lunch in university. I won’t say ‘nothing has changed’, because honestly, a lot has changed; but it has all changed for the better.
And therefore, to celebrate our eighth year together, I am posting on this blog, because I had made her pretty upset when I stopped writing, and for the first time in forever, she will not be proof-reading my writing before it goes up. All I would like to tell her before I sign-out is, thank you for sitting beside me eight years ago, and thank you for never leaving my side ever since. Love you.
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