Friendship

I ask the cab driver to go faster because my heart is aching. The afternoon feels like nothing but a recap of years missed until the time we're taking photos, exchanging hugs and huddling away into taxicabs.

It's like we all suddenly metamorphosed into women. Crossing into a new decade. There are unwelcome flabs, blemishes and unnecessarily long, dry manes- reiterating the years that have gone by. There are also aches we had not hoped to encounter during the Loreto Hall days. But I guess that's what we meant when we said "the big bad world" back then. Wasn't the convent preparing us to take on such a world?

There were movies like "Ann of Green Gables", "Sound of Music" and "Huckleberry Finn", along with those on abortion. How come there wasn't anything on how to deal with miscarriages, heartbreaks and on what to do when the man you risk everything for jilts you? I guess at convents, they never think such things happen. It's all about ethics and virtues, that we're already learning to breach even while in school.

P raises a question about our generation being too scared to walk out and too scared to stay in. Why are we in transition? What would happen if each of us learnt to move on without the men we once claimed, like our younger sisters do. Is it the claim part that makes us this way? Or are we just chicken?

It feels so dishonest, sometimes.

As the cab goes faster, I wonder what kind of a man would not want to be with P who is always the person who keeps the girls together- at least virtually -on Orkut, on FB and who knows exactly how to say "I love you" without saying it. I wonder how any man would not want to be with S who i still like a school-girl, demure, neat and willing to fail her finals just because South Africa lost a cricket match. Why so much suffering stemming from men? I guess it's not even about men. I guess it's only our ego, sexuality and ultimately love. But what is love?

Talking to P and S over fruit-juice, I think of love as "the desperate" need each one of us feels to fly to Dublin, just to see Mother D one more time. I equate love with the smell of books in the English literature section of the library and Ma'am K's fireplace near BIBLIO series. I think of love as the bad feelings we all get when we hear how the Irish and Austrian nuns who wanted to die in Darjeeling were asked to leave and how grills have gone up around the Carmel wing and St.Anne's.

Still, there is no definition of love.

I am hurting from the goodbye hugs. Nothing changes the way you feel toward some people you've shared frangments of your life with. Perhaps insignificant, but shared. Perhaps that ache and the happiness of meeting again after so many years and still being able to lay your heart bare on the table alongside Home Fries, is love.