Edition 55

As an individual who lives in a perpetual haze of nostalgia, I have
often daydreamed about the possibility of owning a time machine
and revisiting the days when life was simpler and happiness not
quite so elusive.
Illustration by : Preeti Das, 2nd year, COE
In those days, friendship was one of those things I took for granted.
The afternoons would see me come home from school, wolf down
a plate of food, and rush off to meet my friends. Though we spent
every single day together, we were seldom bored; our minds,
working in tandem, would always devise new variations on existing
games like hide and seek and chor-police. On days when it was
too hot to play outside, the evenings were spent inside the house
where we learned to play chess or swapped stories about school.
Perhaps the one thing I loved the most about this friendship was
the complete lack of pretence involved in it; in hindsight, those
were perhaps the only years I felt completely free to be myself. I
could laugh as loud as I wanted to, dress in the most ridiculous clothes and mess up all the steps while I was
dancing without fear of judgement. The only thing my friends cared about was me showing up to play every
evening. After all, superficialities don’t really matter in a child’s world, do they?
Cut to the present day, whenever I delve into the treasure trove of childhood memories, I can’t help but mourn
the loss of this beautiful friendship, which couldn’t sustain itself against the twin tides of time and circumstance.
Though more than a decade has passed since that drowsy summer of 2008, when the three of us savoured our
sticky orange ice lollies while sitting on a park bench, it still remains as vivid in my mind as though it happened
yesterday, a bittersweet reminder of a happier, more innocent time.
Illustration: Shreeya Shrivastava, 3rd year, B.Des
Soon after having a heated argument with her partner, Sandra left to visit
her parents. Even as she was driving, she kept thinking of the fight, how she
abruptly left in the middle of it, and how detached she felt at the moment.
Upon reaching her parents’ home, she tried to continue with her routine,
putting on a facade of indifference.
She came across her childhood room, and as she went through her old
things, she thought, “I guess I was always the one to run away.” She recalled
the time when as a kid, she used to keep playing with her toys even as
she heard screaming voices from downstairs, trying as hard as possible to
ignore them and act confident. “Why did I even do that?” she exclaimed,
“Why didn’t I ever go down to see what was going on?”. She remembered
how her younger brother used to feel scared hearing those noises but
would calm down on seeing her act normal despite everything. “I couldn’t
have left him alone, I guess.” She started tearing up as she recalled all
those times when after putting her little brother to sleep, she cried in a
corner, with a pillow in her mouth, trying to stifle any voice that might
disturb him. “I wanted him to be safe … I wanted to be safe.”
After a couple of minutes, she wiped her tears and walked back to her car, still feeling hazy about her memories
yet much lighter. She remembered how even when she saw her mother try to hide her bruises the morning after,
she would pay no attention to it, as those bruises would bring back memories of the night before. “Why did I
ignore those signs? … Why am I still trying to act tough?” She thought about the fight from before, how it all
made sense that she ran away from it and how she acted aloof to her partner’s feelings. She called her partner
up and said, “Hey! Let’s talk about today.”