A search for an old mail brought me across some of my oldest gmail chats with a very dear friend who has now become distant for the last 2-3 years. A natural process, i am sure. Especially in our case, where i came across him at the age of 16, and have never met him once. Strange, nay? Stranger still, (now that i think about it), was the fact that he is 11 years older than me, but for the longest time i was more comfortable talking to him about almost anything in this world, than any of my other supposedly closer friends. I suppose that's why they used to be fond of having pen friends in the past. Creepy as it might be, it's freeing.

i sat for the last 30 minutes, reading our old conversations.. conversations about our daily lives, our trivial daily problems, issues. The college, job stress. Boy-cant-find-girl and girl-kind-find-a-boy problems, heartaches. Silly jokes, stupid sarcasm. And this complete lack of inhibition.. I mean, what could be a bigger testimony to our friendship but the fact that he knew/remembered my various friends from school, college, CA and beyond, and so did i? In my case, i actually became friends with (and still occasionally catch up with) some of them. It's bizarre how somebody becomes a part of your life, attached to you, without making any demands on you. And i guess those are the ones you remember long after, even when those people's importance in your lives doesn't remain the same any longer..

i miss him. I miss our pointless, random conversations, wherein we could have been colleagues sitting across each other at the workstation, and sharing small tidbits of the things as usual. I miss not having to always make a point, to be answerable to somoene when i wish to walk away from a pointless conversation, to always sit and think and analyze the impact of my spoken words on the person across me. i miss that freedom where i connected with someone on almost a daily basis for around 7-8 years, even when we didn't have much to say to each other.

But more than that, more than anything else, i miss myself from that time, where i was self contained, practical, level headed and unperturbed by what the world expected of me. Or, to be fair, where i felt that living upto those expectations was the easiest thing in the world to do. Where distractions, social and societal obligations meant shit to me. I miss the me who never felt obligated to put an '!' after every sentence written, or using emoticons in the hope they might convey an emotion that i may or may not even feel. i miss small things about me.. being a doer instead of a yawner, being driven and ambitious, being on top of my game.. and not giving a flying fuck about the rest of the world..