By the looks of it, I'm in the final stage of depression. I don't really see who is benefiting from me getting out of bed. Any bloke/blokette paid an equal amount could easily do my share of coding the project (possibly better than me and with less references to google.com for a million syntaxes which have slipped the well waxed crevices of my brain) and it wouldn't take much for the few supporting roles I fill in a couple of lives to be filled with someone new. God knows widowers remarry  and long time lovers are given up with less sentimentality nowadays than evoked by a stolen ipod.

Usually, a bright book or a lively song put me back on the path to LaLa land, but lately this panacea too has given up on me.

No, I don't intend to turn into one of those shocking news stories where a girl posts her suicide intentions, is ignored and then appears in the headline stating that society is coming to naught when a distraught idiot can't get help.

I'm just really really feeling like I swallowed a lemon wedgie after a bittergourd pie. And unfortunately, I'm not the kind to down the medicine with a tequila shot. So while my red eyed Monday hung over colleagues hover on the office floor, I must find ways to distract my over active brain from the lack of true companionship. What I wouldn't do right now for a truly interesting conversation that goes well into the wee hours, over stale cheese with old friends who knew what it was like to just let go, who walked into lecture halls with severely oiled hair, without certain items of clothing, who climbed water towers and made politically incorrect statements, who believed in true love and red roses, who loved chocolate like every self respecting girl should, who cried when they read chicken soup stories, who befriended the boys I loved, and loathed the boys who were mean to me, who defended me from the world more than any man ever can, who convinced each other's parents that four 20 year old girls gallivanting around Goa would actually not be all that dangerous and who looked so 5 years old at 11pm sipping tea in a desolate roadside bus stopover as she giggled and said, "this is so cool - we're all alone in the middle of nowhere, and we're all girls!" , who struggled to make it to a girls night out despite being drenched down to our first-time-worn-high-heels after a particularly stressful set of exams, desperate to have a good time, even if we had to push our luck and our bodies' endurance to have it. I miss them. I miss us. I miss who we were. And I know we won't be the same. We've all grown old in a way.

I miss you too, you know who you are. I miss sitting by you, and feeling that sense of calm and the freezing of the million hundred miles a second thought threads in my head, I miss all our first times, I miss all the frustrations, highs, lows that come before you develop a quiet and mature stoicism of each other's weaknesses, I miss having long conversations over nothing and everything, over an uncertain future and a cherished past, I miss knowing that you'd be there when I got back, I miss being the one you called for every little thing, I miss calling you for every little thing, I miss spontaneous drives and intended brushes, I miss all the things that I can't write here, not even in my diary, because they are that beautiful, and it makes them that much less beautiful once its written down in staid words, no matter how eloquent. It'll never be the same, no matter how hard we try. We met as innocent adolescents, a wonder in itself. And now a quiet streak of ink is quietly curling its climber like way into this pure vessel of white milk. As responsibilities cause backaches and strained voices, we rapidly journey on the path to worldly success, coming of age in full splendour. With the coming of the new, the old is gone. And you are that much aware that it was old. That there is an "old" and a "new". And that in itself is a painful realization, almost cramping one's gait and pulling one back. Cliches remain the best way to say this - you can't turn back time.

I miss the old me. Yet I know that this is part of growing up, this murky inner sadness, this acceptance of the white pain that my once carefree friends are going though, this purple bruising of the eternal hope that once lived within us and the realization that no matter how hard you try, you will eventually fall into the pattern of socially accepted life timelines, the same major milestones marking your success. And someday years from now, the dreams that were as vivid in those afternoon classrooms as a red line in a 3000 line unit of code is now,  will be but a fuzzy memory that evokes only feelings, but who's tangible sense of reality in lost in the folds of this quarter life crisis.