Realities

Sometimes we meet new people purely by mistake. You come in contact though some strange workings of fate, and you simply click. It doesn't have to be a romantic click. It's just two personalities that fit together. And there's chemistry there.

But often it's not meant to go beyond those first few days. Why? Usually because both of you have different expectations from the relationship. And because you weren't together long enough to know each other well enough to cope with the parts of your personality that do not click. It doesn't work out because you haven't known each other long enough to trust blindly, and because both of you assume some things which turn out to be untrue.

I made a new friend. I thought we'd talk about work, but we didn't. We discussed Reality and Perception and Time, and our dreams. In the first three hours of our friendship. =)

It didn't turn into "Friends Forever". Because "Friends Forever" probably doesn't exist. But also because our realities were different. Our perceptions were colored by our individual experiences, our stand points. And we hadn't known each other long enough to be able to understand those stand points.

It didn't turn into "Friends Forever". But I'll miss my friend for a long time.

Make-believe

When I was nine years old, I acted in a television serial. I was this little girl who's sent to live in Pakistan, without her family. Her parents are in Canada, where her mother is undergoing treatment for cancer. Then her mother expires, and her father comes back too. The serial, among other stories, followed the course of her life getting used to living without her mother, and later, how she sets up her father with her teacher.

For the most part, there was tragedy. I had to cry a lot. When I came to live alone. When I missed my mother, and when she died. The scene where my father comes back and we meet for the first time after my mothers death was my favorite. I remember I was crying so much, I could not stop myself to deliver my dialogues.

Yup, I did all of the crying myself. No glycerin, or any such crutch. My mum taught me how to do it. Before the shooting started, she took me to a number of her friends, people who'd lost a parent to cancer. And they told me how it was towards the end, what they saw, heard, and felt. And mum told me to absorb all of that.

She told me to recall it when I needed to call up those same emotions. Mum taught me how to put myself in that precise place, and imagine how I'd feel if it was actually happening to me. So I'd think, and feel. And deliver.

My first (and only) TV serial, I was awarded the regional PTV award, and nominated for the Nationals.

Why am I telling you all of this? As a disclaimer.

I write when I'm upset about something. When I'm in the grip of some strong emotion. So it comes out exactly like that: emotional. It does not mean I have a death wish, or I'm aimless, or that I need severe counseling. We're all lonely sometimes. We all get depressed.

I'm just thinking, and imagining, and feeling; and whatever I feel, I'm expressing it in my medium of choice: words.

It's not all make-believe. It's not all real. But then, how can we ever differentiate? =]