Today, while watching my oldest friend, my first best friend, dance with her fiancé on her sangeet, I started crying. All those times when we sat in TC, drinking cosmopolitans and chocolate floats, wondering if she will ever get married to this boy, flashed before my eyes. I thought of all the times I hadn’t called her back, or texted her first, or been there because I was too busy or too distracted, and I worried about what will happen to our friendship now that we’re going to be living in different countries. I wondered if I will get a chance to say bye to her after her pheras tomorrow, because while she’ll stay here for a couple of weeks, as always, I’ll be gone. We met when we were 12, and now we’re 26. Fourteen years is an insanely long time to know someone, so I think we’ll be fine. 

On my way back from the sangeet, I let another friend I was seeing after years scroll through her ex's Facebook profile on my phone. She's married, she has a baby, so she was just looking for gossip.

***

I just spoke to someone who would have been my ideal husband. If only we’d looked beyond our unlikely friendship, if only our families weren’t so complicatedly connected, if only we’d been in the same city, if only we’d given this some serious thought, if only I wasn’t such a chicken, he wouldn’t be married to someone else today and I wouldn’t be rejecting prospective husbands based on ridiculous random attributes.

Maybe the internet isn’t doing us a favour by keeping us connected to everyone we knew.