Feeling lonely amongst friends

More and more friends are getting married. The social scene is changing in a way I never thought possible even a year back. Weren’t we in high school just that day? I was putting nail polish and J scolded me. J who was my best friend and also the head girl, she always had to let me pass without any punishment for my wayward behavior and only because, we were buddies. Those younger kids in the bus, swooning over posters of Leonardo Di Caprio that they bought from Archies with their pocket money, how very naïve they seemed even then! When they bunked school one day even after boarding the bus, I decided school bunkers weren’t cool. And in a few years’ time, when I was in college, I bunked three classes every week to go watch a movie with my boyfriend. Sigh. So much for ‘never’.

In college, the chai under the big tree of my old college canteen was like a flight to intellectual freedom, the kinds that came as a natural to my course. We would discuss movies, projects, even the last episode of the OC over plastic cups of tea and a cigarette or two. Leaving for home late into the afternoon, I would go home and tell Ma how we had seven lectures that day! Lying was such a trend, sometimes to be out with him, on other days, to simply hang out with friends, lying was a natural way of being in college. And it never felt wrong. It only felt ‘cool’.

Soon work life happened. And I took to it as efficiently as I took to books once upon a time. The friends I met at work somehow echoed the similarities we had as today’s generation and they became more than just colleagues. First job, then a second, and today, while I am looking for a third, I realize more than half of my life has been changed and defined outside my home. My friends, (who could be from school, college or work) are now steadily getting hitched. Either they are heavily dating, or they are walking the aisle. It is strange. Not in a bad way, though. The coffee partner I had is now going to get married in a month and is so blissfully dreaming of her life here on that somehow I don’t fit in anymore. The others who are engaged also seem to be looking forward to it than most of the other things in their life.

That leaves me where? I want to spend some more careless evenings with them, I want to know if we will be friends forever, but the equations are changing innocently enough..We no more discuss boys (sigh) or our careers (atleast for sometime to come) and what we discuss is something that keeps my emotional quo just about empty. I am happy for my friends all around me, very much so. But has friendship taken a backseat? Or is it one of those things that change with time and you suddenly realize it after it hits you slowly but effectively?

To me, it matters. But hopefully time will cure me of this ache too.