of friends and foes

Today, in one of my endless musings passing through my crowded mess of a mind, i was thinking of the people termed as friends.

As a kid, we were not encouraged to mix with the leikai (locality) kids for fear that we would pick up bad words and other bad habits - now you know why i turned out to be such a snob! - and so i had no leikai friend except for a girl (approved by parents as coming from 'good family'!!). They moved elsewhere and so i grew up only with school friends i.e. friends from school (oh yes, we get it ma'am, you really don't need to explain that..god..)

It is a personality flaw i suppose but i am no longer in touch with a single one of them - we, who cried as if the world was coming to an end at the farewell party, scribbled how we would never forget each other on the white school shirt. i still have the shirt but not the friends! It is not as if i cannot trace them - i know all it would take is for me to spend a minute trawling one of those social sites ( which i am allergic to but that is fodder for another post). i even had a couple of them tracing me, seeking me out but i - oh the bitch i am - did not take the stretched hands. Sometimes, i wonder why. Is it that i have outgrown those childish giggly moments? Or is it just that i am a different person now and i want to preserve memories as they are - like the shirt with promises all broken - and don't want to find out that i cannot gel with them anymore? i have steadfastly refused to answer mails from old friends - i guess i am becoming more anti-social as my hair ripens into grey.

What is it that makes me so indifferent to the past? i hate dwelling in it - i like the past to be in the background. But to ignore old friends, does not that smack of something lacking in me - like loyalty?

Which makes me wonder - would the few (very, very, very few) people i call friends now also go this way? i am so good at being alone - i love being alone, sometimes i think i would be perfectly fine if you put me in a room filled with books and an internet connection (so i could regale the world with tales of 'alone-ness') and yes, food.

But i guess with the few friends i have now, i am in more 'stable' relationships.i still have the desire to know if they are alive, to worry about them at times, to abuse them with the choicest of galis, to want them to be in touch with me.. i hope i would continue to pester them with my presence till my sanity deserts me. And i hope they would nag me into not dropping out of the orbit if i should go hibernating, as i am wont to do at times.

What is with the 'foes' part in the title? i have no foe for the simple reason that if i don't like someone, they cease to exist for me.