Once upon a time !
Once upon a time, before the
advent of ‘Facebook’, there was this lady who kept on looking for her school
friends , she searched Google, she did not come across any site were she could find them . Many leisure
hours were spent in the hope of finding long lost friends, many evenings were
spent looking at the old school albums and imagining ‘how would it be if I were to meet
them now, we would have so much to talk, so much to share’ and she glowed in
the feeling of warmth which emanated from her mere thoughts !!
She spent her days and evenings
in the rigmarole of life, but whenever she got a chance to pause, all she could
ever think of was about her friends and of getting in touch
with them again, so the days passed… they became weeks and weeks passed to
become months and so on.
Then few years later, on an
orange tinged sun setting evening she stumbled upon the freshly doled out 'FaceBook', and her life changed, she spend her days and nights logging on to it,
updating her status, looking for lost connections, lost friends, long lost neighbors
she had in childhood, teachers whom she admired, teachers whom she would rather
forget and to her utter delight and shock she even came across some old ‘crushes’
and 'ex flames', but the D Day came when from hopping from the ‘friend list’ of
one friend to another she hit a treasure trove, yes she got hold of the profile
of her bestest school friend whom she missed badly and for whom she was looking
all over the internet realm all these years.
Finally they connected, they
exchanged messages, they ‘liked’ each others photographs, 'oohed' and 'aahed' about
everything and then they decided to speak, she happily dialed
the number and there it was, the voice of her friend, and she started off , a
dime a dozen, when the voice from the other side sounded lukewarm , devoid of
any enthusiasm, she made sure she was talking to the right person, she called
her by the name and confirmed, oh yes it was her, but why was she not talking
the same way they used to , why there was no excitement in her voice? was it
for this that she was waiting all these
years? she wondered. She slowed down her
pace as per the pace from the other side, she tried to probe but she could not
get anything out from her friend, she got formal replies with some smattering
about ‘how good old days were’, it was clear that she is not going to be the
same as she was a few decades back, and then they said their goodbyes.
She went over and over again on
what had just happened and she realised that it was her fault after all, she was hoping to start the conversation from
where they had left it when they were together years ago, sitting on the same
bench in class 9th where they
used to chatter and enjoy and share each and every details of their life, it dawned upon her that they were not 14
year olds any more and it was not right for her to expect the same level of
excitement and closeness from her BFF
after so many years, she realized that though she had got stuck at that time
span, her friend had definitely moved on and might be having
other pressing priorities or issues, or may be she has just changed, that is what might have made her speak the way she
did.
After this particular Luke warm
episode, she actually stopped logging on to 'Facebook' every hour like she used
to do earlier, like in the middle of cooking, or waiting for her
child at the bus stop and sometimes even in the middle of the night when every one
else had fallen asleep, just to check how much 'likes' her status has got and
what is the response to the latest 'selfie' she had uploaded ! what is the comment her friend has given, but then she thought
to herself that 'the time of anticipation and imagination' before they met on 'FB' was much better than this so called ‘real time’.
So like every good thing, her run
with FB also came to an end, she decided to go off 'FB' for sometime and made a conscious effort to chat with the real people around,
her kids, her husband, the lady whom she met at the bus stop daily and also the
vegetable vendor lady.. it was much warmer and very much real, more real than
any ‘realtime response’.
Disclaimer : This is a work of fiction , all characters in this are imaginary, any similarity to any person living or dead is purely coincidental
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