Of the many things this pandemic has taken from us, the one I miss most is my friend’s living room.
At least once a week, without fail, all of us would pile into her house and spend the evening together. Sprawled on the couches, fighting for the beanbag, a large bowl of whatever healthy snack Aunty had left us lying on the coffee table, we were content—there was nothing better to do. Similarly, someone would always muse, “this sunset is just too good,” forcing the rest of us to pause, look out the window and for the 200th time gladly appreciate the too-good sunset.
Then senselessly, aimlessly conversation would meander—cringing over prepubescent 7th grade memories (why did we ‘dab’ so much?), posing radical theories about the uselessness of school, weaving through by-lanes of our evolving—always evolving—opinions on love and death and drugs and desire, giddily fueled by a rhythm of inside jokes, and sometimes, only sometimes, indulging in the thrills of petty gossip.
These get-togethers had no purpose, no agenda—misshapen minds unspooling and refurling together, feeding off of each other. We didn’t put forth revolutionary ideas or share tall tales of courage. Honestly, all we did was talk. Or rather, for a lack of a better word, talk nonsense. We’d whine about the most insignificant problems in our lives, discuss, in hushed tones, what to do about things we can do nothing about, and someone (i.e. me) would always bring up how everyone except them was in a relationship. (Even my didi is juggling multiple boyfriends; my complaining is justified.)
Without noticing, our favourite sunset would quieten to a midnight blue. When the growling of our stomachs became louder than our chatter, we’d spend another 20 minutes figuring a solution. Eat out? Home food? Order in? From where? And every single time, we’d settle on staying in—willingly choosing to stay in!—and ordering a greasy pepperoni pizza from the restaurant whose delivery boy knew our faces too well. Going anywhere meant breaking the perfect inertia of doing nothing for hours and none of us ever had the heart.
Those evenings are some of my most treasured memories. But if you ask me to name even one thing we did there together, I can’t. In retrospect, ‘timepass’—unproductive, wasteful, purposeless ‘timepass’ is the only noun I can conjure up to describe what we did (or rather, what we didn’t). But it never felt like we weren’t making good use of our time. The hours spent re-watching Friends, scrolling through Instagram, and playing Among Us all come with a side platter of guilt; this didn’t.
In these comfortable silences and unfiltered moments of honesty was I able to see and be seen in the rawest way yet. Dressed in my most unpresentable t-shirt, hunched over, trying to steal the last slice of ‘za: no form of pre-planned togetherness could ever compete with this waste of time.
Of the many things this pandemic has taken from us, the one I miss most is not noticing daylight settling away into dusk in my friend’s living room.
Written by Anahita Ahluwalia
Designed by Nandini Bohra
Images taken from Unsplash
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