D for Diary

Being the only child I had been alone most of the times. There was a point of time when I was a kid I was longing for people around me so I used to have imaginary friends and cousins at home. My family is not very well knit. We know that our extended family exist but we don’t quite gel up. We have always thought, rather the elders of the family always thought it is better to stay away than to be together. They say even if you are a street away it’s ok to drop in once in a while say hi and go in our ways. Precisely, they did not believe, actually prefer to get personally and emotionally involved. So during my vacations I would stay at home and play CSI myself. I still remember making an ID for me and banging from one door to another shouting New York police open the door. It sounds funny now but I loved that game. :D

Sometimes, I used to think that I am crazy because I talk to walls like people. I was pathetically alone and a really quiet girl until class 7. This is when I met a girl and slowly I started to open up. I would say she made me. If I talk so much now you can blame it on her. We were “THE” best friends in school and then we lived in the neighborhood so most of the times she is my house or I am at hers.  We gossip, try different hairstyles, write down the lyrics of Hindi songs and sing them, cook something really disastrous, talk about our crushes and all that. Then came the vacations again, honestly I hate vacations as much as everybody else loved it. Lonely days were back because my friend left to her cousin's. During this time we decided that we will write a diary of what we did everyday when we were not with each other. That’s how it all started my diary writing habit. Not everybody who comes into your life stays forever. Except few unlucky ones you just don’t get off their backs. :P Likewise, this friend of mine left forever. I felt so lonely and bad. My imaginary friends didn’t make me feel good anymore. Once you experience something for real, the mock ups doesn’t quite fit in. Just like how first love never leaves your mind no matter how much the next person loves you, you still think first love is perfect no matter how imperfect it was.

So this friend of mine left me when I was in class 9, after that I had friends but not someone with whom I would share every damn thing. So I started writing diaries. I write pages and pages everyday, on everything that happened in my life, the things I cannot share with anybody but her. We didn’t have access to phones; I wish we had had mobile phones then. Then slowly diaries became an integral part of my life. I started making daily entries and when I fell in love for the first time I didn’t have someone to share about it so I wrote how it made me feel. I still have them and I read it every now and then it is very funny. The teenager feeling and how I felt when I was in love. I have stuck the 1 re coin he touched on the diary and written poems, chocolate covers, greeting cards, love letters (do teenagers write this anymore?) These diaries talk tales about my life, the people who hurt me, loved me, the ones who left me if everybody who played an important role in my life wants to know how I felt about them and how they made me feel in various situations all they have to do is steal my diary. It says everything about my life and how it has changed.

The same diary was the one that made my mom know about my first love and create a commotion. That’s when I stopped mentioning names on my diary. Later, we moved to a new house and my dad thought that I should have a separate room where I created a separate compartment for my diary, where nobody can find it. Then I got a wardrobe that had a secret compartment in itself with a key, I still have that wardrobe but the diary lies around carelessly because I hardly write diaries anymore, instead I started writing letters to God. Sometimes, he does reads it. Those papers go into the secret compartment I took all of them yesterday to pin it back when I found a photograph of the love of my life, a photo that we clicked in his balcony when I visited him in Bangalore.  I read the diary I wrote when I first met him to when he proposed me. It felt really good. He was the one who made me stop writing diaries because he took away the loneliness from me and the diary lost its role in my life.

But then in the past few days, I have started writing them again, not because I feel lonely but because I want to see how my life is changing.