Reunion

So, I met with my friends from college.  It was not planned, a guerrilla meeting as we called it. We spent the night eating, drinking and laughing our hearts out with all the quirky stuff of whatabouts.  

My man, who had known me as a drab with no bone of fun and temerity, questioned how I ever ended up with such a group. A group which he thinks is too conspicuous, and is, on the surface, more likely at the other end of the spectrum he has presumed I had been in. But that’s actually it. Our differences, their extreme weirdness and blandness are what probably had made us come together; what had apparently, brought me to them.

They say of words I never had enough guts to utter and stories I know, I can never tell. And they do these as casually and as sincerely as one can ever be without worrying what other people might think of them. They make it feel like it is okay to ever laugh so loudly until the people from across the streets would sssshhhh you to shut up or look at you with piercing eyes of hate and bile disdain.

Meeting them, I had to wander about, lost, on my four-inch wedges for hours. Contemplating, laidback and tired as I always am, I could not help but asked myself why I had to do all these when I could have just gone home and snuggle up in bed. Yet, there was I, waiting, tiring and braving as the night dies with the threats of strong winds and heavy rains, for people I never had clear affiliation with.

It took me until the night’s end, when I was already complaining of a jaw that had locked in agape and tears welling up from laughter, that I got the answers to all of these apprehensions. I knew then, it was not really them I had waited for. But I was actually waiting for myself, for my own time, for a release from the leash I long inflicted myself with.

They make me come out of my shame shell. They are living the life for me, so I won’t have to. They make it feel like it is okay to not be “okay” in the standards of the okay and of the acceptable, within the doctrines of conventional femininity.

From their machine-gun talks, the nonsensical thoughts, to the most in-depth and little more personal stories, all these helped me reconnect with my long lost self. The self, I know, I have all the while deep within me, just waiting to be knocked about but I know I can never be, in my own self-restricted sense of reality.

 9/ 15/ 13