It’s been a while, but that’s the way it always has been with us. I am posting this on a day when I know I’d have heard from you. Some years you’d call, some years you’d WhatsApp, and the last couple of years, you took to Twitter just so you could needle me.
Twitter was our playground. We had our own language, I remember people getting irritated by it! I was always in awe of you, and your sublime words and ideas. It didn’t begin on Twitter though, it began with a comment on a blog. But it did end on Twitter, and it speaks about how out of touch I was, that I got to know when someone added me to a conversation.
On that day, many people reached out to me, asking me if I was ok. I was, but I wasn’t, and ironically, I felt you’d be the only person who could understand what I was going through. But I went through the motions – I tweeted about you, retweeted those posts about you, and signalled normalcy.
For a while, I considered starting an anonymous blog to publish those brilliant posts you wrote to me, but then I thought that’d be betraying you, us. So I didn’t. I remember your plans of us publishing our 55 anthology, but later you told me I shouldn’t ever write a book! Our plans always had other plans.
I now realise that our plans were all around making sure to be around for each other, even if it was from afar. But we never got around to it. I am especially guilty on this. There are a bunch of mails from you with some version of “Where are you, mister?”. You cared enough to drag me out of my moods of funk. Once upon a time, I did that for you too. But in the recent years, I never asked enough, and you never said enough.
I don’t miss you. Your cloverleaf postcard from Amsterdam sits in a place where I see it everyday. You are alive in my memories, and when I think of that lousy wordplay that isn’t fit for public consumption, you’re still my go-to person. You are alive in all our conversations from a decade (and more) ago, they’re still fun to read! I just realised our “Untweetable” thread has 500+ mails! And every other day, Timehop throws up one of our crazy Twitter chats. So yes, I don’t miss you.
But I do miss a part of me that you dragged out. A childlike abandon that is so hard in a world full of labels. What I will miss most though, is the idea of hearing from you. In a lonesome corner of my otherwise rational mind, there lives a hope that a certain Susie image will suddenly pop up on the top of my WhatsApp messages, and say “It’s been a while, mister”.