Who ARE these people?

Featured image: Max Liebermann, Münchner Biergarten

My train of thoughts led me to a now-remote corner of my mind- school days. I started thinking about my ex-classmates- the ones which I had not kept in touch with after school had ended (just for the record, this group is a fairly large portion of my entire class since I haven’t kept in touch with about 90% of them). Random names started popping in my head accompanied by the faces that went with those names. Then, doubts… Did he/she really look like this? How was his/her voice? Strange I’ve never thought of him/her for the last two years (it has been two years since I graduated from school)! These doubts, these questions, took me by surprise. Names and faces of people who I had been friends[ish] with back in school now seemed alien to me.

There was this guy who used to sit right behind me and we were into the same TV shows (principally the NBC sitcom, ‘Friends’), so we used to talk about that quite a lot; There was a girl who used to find me as annoying as I found her- we drove each other nuts, but I knew (and I’m sure she did too) that it’s good to have one person you can be rude and frank with, because they are going to be equally rude and frank with you (no guilt, you see); There was a girl who loved English and its intricacies as much as I did, so we enjoyed guessing the etymologies of various words and sniggering together when other classmates went wrong with their grammar while speaking or their spelling and punctuation while writing (which seems mean and condescending, I know, but let’s not go there); Then there was this guy I used to text with all the time (so we knew everything about each other- likes, dislikes, daily schedule, habits), but barely spoke with face-to-face.

I haven’t seen or talked to any of the above examples for the last two years. There are many more such ex-classmates, people who I shared quite a lot with in school, but whose faces, names and voices I now remember and think, “Who are these people?”…