Of My Moleskine Notebook

There are various discerning magazines lying strewn across the bedroom floor, and the laptop on the bed is whirring softly. Radiohead is playing in the background, and the comforter is a mess with books, bags, more magazines and pillows.

I’m lying on my best friend’s bed which I’ve not done since we both left school, and despite it all, it felt like the single most reassuring thing I’ve felt for a very long time. Hanis turned 18 today, and with a box with five different slices of cake and a package with new lingerie (traditions always stand), I made my way up the staircase that I would have taken four to five times a week without fail a year ago.

While I play around with the dials on your SLR, trying to keep up with your new accounts of college life and connections with the lives we thought we left behind, I can’t help but look back at how far we have changed since last year.

Last September, we were both school girls in baggy white tunics. We knew what we wanted from life and wouldn’t settle for less. Our lives were spent between being in front of the CS3 making edits on typography to chasing an exam we both knew we didn’t give a shit about. The light at the end of the tunnel was getting out of school, and the long stretch of holidays where we could do whatever we wanted. To intern at a proper magazine, a think-tank, to host a play, to write a fantastic discourse on life. We knew we wanted out, and we knew we were going to explode. You with your photography, me with my pen.

Did we settle for less, or have we merely learned to manage and make do with whatever things have dealt out for us? Should I be bothered that our tight troupe of friends and believers no longer breathe and exude the passion we once held at sixteen? Is this what it means to grow up, when you accept what is given to you, and you learn to let things go?

So this might just be me growing up, when I choose to fill my extra hours integrating some function or another in the cold recesses of the library. This is me making that one step of maturity when I fill in uni applications for subject codes which I don’t know I will love but which I know I will have to learn to.

This is me growing older when I lie on my side, pulling lint from your jeans, denying, but knowing deep inside that our paths have diverged, despite me being happy with how things are going for you, and contented with how I’m going.

But it’s us growing older together, nonetheless.

No matter how much things have changed, and no matter how many calls we missed from each other in the past months; no matter how we’re both at the opposite ends of the valley, no matter the fact that you have a good friend in college named Ainaa; no matter how great of a photographer you have developed to become; and no matter what any of us are ever going to be.

Happy 18th Birthday Hanis.

<3