#myhorcruxes #friendships
I've recently returned from a long overdue vacation. Like many other vacations that I've taken, there was the usual relaxing, sightseeing, dining and photo-clicking. But this vacation was special. It was the first in over eighteen months, and the first after Dad's passing, which was an unbelievably hard time. The last time I'd been to this place was with him and Mum.
When I first went to the UK over twenty years ago, I had butterflies in my tummy for all kinds of reasons. I'd never been outside India, didn't know a single person in the new country, had taken on a huge financial liability to be able to study abroad in an expensive country, and was going to be away from family for the longest time that I'd ever spent apart from them despite the boarding school experience as a child.
But every visit since has always felt like a homecoming. This time I was visiting somewhere I'd never been - Wales, and somewhere that I've actually lived before - London, one of my favourite big cities in the world. But what set this vacation apart was the opportunity it gave me to reconnect with so many friends from that part of the world. And just that has been so overwhelmingly therapeutic.
I got to meet some of them after a gap of six months, some others after more than five years, and yet others after two decades! With each reunion, however, despite the physical changes we noticed in each other, the feeling of nostalgia and reconnection was palpable. It was almost as if the time in between had not passed.
When friends meet after long periods of time, the conversations tend to be rather unstructured and meandering - one moment we'd be discussing the weather (a common British pastime no doubt), the next we'd be asking each other the size of our broods... or the size of our investment portfolios, and seamlessly move on to narrating a recent incident on the train (like being separated from a child on the London tube - mine!)
While there were several group reunions, sometimes one meeting was not enough, and so mini-group reunions followed the bigger ones. And sometimes even that was not enough so one-on-one meetings were also required. There was just so much to catch up on! I happily flitted from breakfast meetings to brunch meetings to lunch meetings to coffee meetings and then to dinner meetings, on a single day at times.
Given I was on vacation but everybody else was not, scheduling catch-ups required some pre-work. Making trusty old Whatsapp my main tool, I managed to provide sufficient heads-up to most people that I was around. But just as a surprise element can make an exquisite choreography even better, some of the most heartwarming rendezvous were those that were not even planned.
A friend that I hadn't seen in twenty years reached out after they saw a post from me on LinkedIn mentioning my arrival in the UK. Another who had remained incommunicado for all practical purposes for the better part of two decades insisted on taking a train ride together just so we'd have some quiet time by ourselves outside the large-group chatter. Another showed up to a group dinner early so that we'd have some one-on-one time together. And one made a surprise appearance when I wasn't expecting to see them at all, brightening up my day.
But time has passed after all, and there is so much that I have missed, so many stories that I haven't heard and shared. Not just birthdays, weddings, promotions and change of careers or home bases, but also the birth of their children, the demise of their parents, the separation from spouses, the health scares, the trials and tribulations of being single parents, the anxiety over and reconciliation with the fact that their choice of where to put down their roots had changed their family structure forever...
I was reminded of how much more I had to learn and do as a friend. And how much joy it brought me to be in the same time and space as them, sharing parts of ourselves with each other, in a way that no amount of social media could ever do. The horcrux analogy by Trevor Noah really rang true for me in every way. These conversations, however truncated they may have seemed, put back more life in me in a single week than I've had in several months! And I'm so grateful for my good fortune in having such horcruxes who make me come alive again.
I came back from the vacation refreshed, rejuvenated,... healed. I came back having renewed my vows to be a better friend.
