Skip to main content

Two Friends

Two events occurred this past month. A good friend turned a year older and she continues to be happily single on most days. The other one lost her husband to a serious illness. She has a kid a few years younger than mine. Both women were my classmates and at such different places in their lives that it is hard to imagine we once had a lot more in common than our age. I thought about the last time we were all together - so many years ago. Our hopes and dreams in life had been a lot closer back then even though we were very different people. We all wanted to grow up, be independent and begin our lives separate from our parents. The future was fuzzy and unknown - we could only see as far as the next step and sometimes not even that. 

Both of my friends have followed their real passions and are very happy doing what they do for a living. Yet the passage of time has carved them into entities completely unlike each other and unlike me. And we all continue to diverge even further as defining life events pull one person sharply in a certain direction no one else will venture to or know anything about. It made me wistful to think how these women who go back such a long way in my life may have felt alone on a birthday or a funeral despite being surrounded by people old and new to their lives. I was reminded of this Orson Welles quote:

We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...
25 comments
Read more