Once upon a time !

Once upon a time, before the advent of ‘Facebook’, there was this lady who kept on looking for her school friends , she searched Google, she did not come across any site were she could  find them . Many  leisure hours were spent in the hope of finding long lost friends, many evenings were spent looking at the old school albums and imagining ‘how would it be if I were to meet them now, we would have so much to talk, so much to share’ and she glowed in the feeling of warmth which emanated from her mere thoughts !!

She spent her days and evenings in the rigmarole of life, but whenever she got a chance to pause, all she could ever think of was about her friends and  of getting in touch with them again, so the days passed… they became weeks and weeks passed to become months and so on. 

Then few years later, on an orange tinged sun setting evening she stumbled upon the freshly doled out 'FaceBook', and her life changed, she spend her days and nights logging on to it, updating her status, looking for lost connections, lost friends, long lost neighbors she had in childhood, teachers whom she admired, teachers whom she would rather forget and to her utter delight and shock she even came across some old ‘crushes’ and 'ex flames', but the D Day came when from hopping from the ‘friend list’ of one friend to another she hit a treasure trove, yes she got hold of the profile of her bestest school friend whom she missed badly and for whom she was looking all over the internet realm all these years.

Finally they connected, they exchanged messages, they ‘liked’ each others photographs, 'oohed' and 'aahed' about everything and then they decided to speak, she happily dialed the number and there it was, the voice of her friend, and she started off , a dime a dozen, when the voice from the other side sounded lukewarm , devoid of any enthusiasm, she made sure she was talking to the right person, she called her by the name and confirmed, oh yes it was her, but why was she not talking the same way they used to , why there was no excitement in her voice? was it for this  that she was waiting all these years? she wondered.  She slowed down her pace as per the pace from the other side, she tried to probe but she could not get anything out from her friend, she got formal replies with some smattering about ‘how good old days were’, it was clear that she is not going to be the same as she was a few decades back, and then they said their goodbyes. 

She went over and over again on what had just happened and she realised that  it was her fault after all, she was hoping to start the conversation from where they had left it when they were together years ago, sitting on the same bench in class 9^th  where they used to chatter and enjoy and share each and every details of their life,  it dawned upon her  that they were not 14 year olds any more and it was not right for her to expect the same level of excitement and closeness  from her BFF after so many years, she realized that though she had got stuck at that time span, her friend had definitely moved on and might  be having other  pressing priorities or issues, or may be she has just changed, that is what  might have made her speak the way she did.

After this particular Luke warm episode, she actually stopped logging on to 'Facebook' every hour like she used to do earlier,  like in  the middle of cooking, or waiting for her child at the bus stop and sometimes even in the middle of the night when every one else had fallen asleep, just to check how much 'likes' her status has got and what is the response to the latest 'selfie' she had uploaded !  what is the comment her friend has given, but then she thought to herself that 'the time of anticipation and imagination' before they met on 'FB' was  much better than this so called ‘real time’.

So like every good thing, her run with FB also came to an end, she decided to go off 'FB' for sometime and made a conscious effort to chat with the real people around, her kids, her husband, the lady whom she met at the bus stop daily and also the vegetable vendor lady.. it was much warmer and very much real,  more real than any ‘realtime response’.

Disclaimer :  This is a work of fiction , all characters in this  are imaginary, any similarity to any person living or dead is purely coincidental