Menagerie...

No love is everlasting than that of a true friend’s….
And this true friend could be anyone. From my mother to God to a friend in a distant country to friends with whom I have grown up and cherished my rights and wrongs with, to teachers, to siblings( my brother once authoritatively claimed that He is the best I could get)and to pets, I know that the Love in Friendship is the only kind of love that would journey with me to my pyre. And am truly blessed to have, if not a big number , but some very few Gems in my life.
Friends are like pillows. The more you have the merrier you are. But only one or two would be your princess pillows. The only ones on whom you rest your head whether it’s a shadowed day, a migraine or a state of pure bliss and lightness or when you just want to sleep in the bus.
I always tell, I have a rather colorful variety of acquaintances, which sometimes does make my actual friends doubt about my sense of discretion on people and thereby often astounding them. And the subjects are:
a)people who talk to me and vice versa because either of us are bored, to even think {unavailability of more interesting ones could also pass lol)
b)people who I talk to because I don’t want to hurt their fragile selves with my silence.
c) people who I listen to because they are an inevitable source of entertainment with their taunting and reckless display of vanity which would have otherwise camouflaged an innate, imposing, insecure nature.
d) people who I am with because I don’t have to necessarily speak to them and be comfortable with our silence.
e) people who are with me because they don’t want to hurt me by ditching me!
f) people( this is indicating the “stronger” sex) who talk to me because they are talking to Me and people whom I talk to because I am talking to “Them”.
g) people who were my supposedly great friends once upon a time but on who and me, ingratitude, pride, envy, possessiveness, misunderstandings, expectations, callousness and an all too soon feeling of purposelessness has descended in the relationship thereby rendering it a memory worth deleting from the rusting recesses of brains and peeling chambers of heart (yet are following me on twitter!)
h) people with no sense of commonness whatsoever between us, from another land across the seas who make me feel great for who I am.
i) people from another land, another generation who I talk to because they feel great when they talk to me.
j)people who I talk to because I remember these shadows in tuition classes and class rooms somewhere in my distant past ( this is the group who rarely exchange a hi and bye with me yet are on my FB “friends” list)
k) novices who were “ always there” in the vicinity but became much more visible when a good length of separable distance came between us making me regret my narrow sense of vision and judgement and maybe the lose of good times we could have had together , till then.
l)people who I maintain connections with, for the sake of revival of good old times and for the blooming sense of nostalgia our conversations could bring to a perennially dazed state of my mind,
m)people who had committed the mistake of betrayal only to regret it and water the almost wilted plant of friendship later on( to not much avail,though) and last but never the least,
n) people who I talk to, not because they want me in their lives, or because a similar effort has been made from their side but because I wouldn’t want to lose them for who they are to me and to the world.
I thank all these people for making me who I am, irrespective of how good my encounters with them were or are. If it was good the memories are worth remembering and if it was bad the experience was worth having , to learn a lesson in life.
Honestly, my reticence and introversion have led me to lose many a fanciful and influential relations especially with the senior crowd, often diverting their opinions about me from amicable to arrogance and on this, contrarily, I honour myself. For being me and not stooping down to the level of a trying-hard-almost-getting-there-tart.
But I also do regret sometimes when I have bullied people with my words and disposition, shamefully dating back to my childhood onwards. Forgive me, for to err is human and to forgive (from your part) would definitely be worth considering Divine ;) Destruction is easier than construction, after all.
People like me,of course, would need a networking site with separate categories for friends and acquaintances, whereby the number of acquaintaces would be in three digits and that of friends in a humble single digit. Anyways, I console myself, as books and friends should be few but good, lol.
To end,I love my friends for who they are. Even if they don’t measure upto the norms of sensibility set by a seemingly straight society. We laugh together, we sigh together, we sing together , we make up after a fight together with an arrogant “Ok Sorry man” and…… of course we choose to fly together, against the currents of times. All because we belong to the same flock.

The best mirror ,is after all, a good friend. :)