Traces

I had a dream, a vivid one. I am standing by my brown almirah back home, the one with all my notes, books, keepsakes, 22 years of memories.  

As always, I start going through the pile and pick up books to browse. To an outsider, my actions look random. It's like watching a kid trying out candy from a Christmas assortments' box, I certainly must not know what I'm going to get, right? 

Wrong. Because I have a plan. I start with kindergarten calendars (this was our schools version of a planner for every child), making my way up through the grades. Then moving onto junior college, degree college, and grad school. Only this time's different. I've an unwavering focus, like a woman on a mission. I only sort through my school pile.

And you know, I can find traces of you in everything I open. 

There's our script for some teacher's day play, not too shabby for a bunch of 12 yr olds. There's our imaginary school with house colors, black, white, grey and gold, and us both taking stabs at creating unconventional uniforms. The usual FLAMES and other cringe stuff. There are stories or essays and both of us competiting at "who can write more BS, faster?", an imaginary game we played but never admitted to, with only two dumbass contestants.

There's our rendition of what we wanted our imaginary boyfriends to look and dress like, all three of them with the same spiked hair because of limited drawing abilities. Guidelines for emcee-ing random language days, pretty confident the teachers were inventing these just to see us embarrass ourselves.

There are your corrections to my spelling and horrid handwriting. Then your quintessential J in signature, the one with the smile face, in a sign. You beeming with joy at creating a signature and thinking it looks so fly, and us looking at you with incredulous expressions.

There's an assortment of sheets that looks like a child hand bound it, immediately recognize it as our scrap book. It still smells of some horrible glue, not joker gum or fevicol, but some really horrible glue. It has these categories and our attempt at scrap booking for those categories. There's also a sayings book, one quote a day type.

Ah, I finally find those slam books. Three. We each had three slams books, talk about extra. And every book has you and vidu, either on the front or back cover. You both have also taken over any blank sheets available to write essays about us and wild declarations, this sheet is reserved by Nirali/ Vidula. I know you'll find the same on yours. Our never ending pride for NirViKsha shining through. 

Reading through all those, it feels like it was just yesterday all this happened. It feels like just yesterday we sat down during recess, swapped tiffins per the deal we made, your sandwich dhokla to vidu, vidu's methi paratha to me, my biskoot roti to you. Our moms will be happy today, clean plate club. As we eat, we work on some incredibly stupid idea - another hypothetical school where there would be dance period and no white shorts because who wants a blood stained skirt. Or we'll think of starting another imaginary club like scrap booking that we'll give up midway on. The quiting doesn't bother us, we're too invested in trying as many things as possible. We feel strong. We feel invincible. Even the gibberish physics lectures or torturous algebra periods can't stop this feeling. Because we have each other. And that's enough. 

For now, that's where I want to be. 

The alarm rings and I'm mad, mad at being jolted into the rude reality. I run my fingers angrily through my hair and today, they smell of the scrap book glue.