This post is kinda different from my other posts...its about a past that I had pushed to the back of my mind. Its kinda wierd when the past comes flooding back. It stimulates you far more than any alcohol or addictive substance can. Well, what has flooded my senses are my school days. I tend to associate songs to people and events. Well, I'm listening to the Savage Garden album Affirmation and listening to those songs brought a different kind of warmth...no...a familiar but forgotten kinda warmth to my heart. A warmth I hadn't felt for a good 4 or 5 years. Well the songs from Affirmation don't bring all of my school days to the fore of my mind, but instead a particular trip I had gone for in the winter of 2001.

I had gone to Manali for a Winter Carnival in which our group - Gregorios - was competing. It was an awesome trip....we also spent New Year's while on that trip. And it was made all the more special because of one person, I suppose one of my closest friends. Although the memory does make a warm feeling well up inside me, it also brings with it its share of regret and sadness. Regret that I didn't realise the value of friendship and sadness that now I've drifted apart from that friend. I didn't consciously do anything to wreck the friendship...its just that feelings for that friend got in the way. And the feelings too didn't distance that friendship, it was my immaturity in dealing with them that ruined it. By the time I realized what an ass I had been, it was too late. And now I realize that its never gonna be the same. Never. There was a time when I felt totally at ease around her but now, the distance is so much, that whenever I meet her, I feel like a foreigner around her. Every time we meet, I feel like between that meeting and the past, is an awesome emptiness, a void, one that will always remain.

There is another regret - immaturity in dealing with someone else's feelings for me on that very same trip. Won't go much into that.

You see - I believe life is like the trade cycle...it has its ups and downs, periods of prosperity and depression(not talking monetary here) and that trip ended the upswing, that is where the graph of my life peaked and then on it was some bad days. Well there was the friendship falling apart, there was the pressure of the boards, there was bullying because of obesity.....but then college happened and the upswing began again.

When I look at it in hindsight, I'm glad that downswing happend after that trip, it made me far more mature than I was, it made me stronger and it made me realize that all that bullying and teasing was very trivial, though I didn't think so at that time, and that those very same bullies and 'bad people' will stand by me today. As for the regrets - always there.