Departure of Someone

I remembered the incident, when Rachel suddenly saw Mayank using his weird Tashan again, pulling out the buttons of his shirt and leaving them unbuttoned. Just into our early teens, yet a classmate like that, it looked so werid, in a classroom filled with girls and boys both of the same age, how could he effortlessly unbutton his shirt and show off what he didn't seem to have at all?
Rachel would get so angry at this. And this what what I loved about her- decency. And that made our bond stronger. Rachel and me, I felt, were best friends for the same reason. Though we were opposite, she into the naughtier side, and I quite shy and simple. While she loved to play a lot, I on the contrary was serious. When she hated studies, I was studious, and a topper of the class.
Yet our thoughts matched. At least, some thoughts. Some thoughts about morality. I remembered the way we used to play, just into teens and yet we became the best of friends.

I was in seventh class. I was sitting alone for the whole day, since I had no friends at all. It was my first day at the school of Oxford, weird environment, which I felt like as if was burdening me, was suffocating me. And when the day ended, Rachel, veery shy and stammering back that time, came to shake hands with me, "I am Rachel." She smiled.
I smiled back as I shook hands with her. "Best friends?" She enquired. She never knew how to speak, I felt. I felt this girl was stupid, and of no use. I had already suffered so many heartbreaks in this best-friends relationship, I never wanted to have any one again in my life.

***

I met Mayank yesterday on the road, yet one thing I couldn't forget for sure, the way Rachel had pulled off his shirt while in the class to teach him a lesson, yet then ended up apologising to him. Her simple nature attracted me to the extent we soon became best friends, a year later. I remember how she used to be with me solving all my problems. My books had her handwriting, my rough notebooks filled with the lyrics of the nonsense hollywood songs she kept on writing, her rough notebooks filled with my artistic figurines, and her dupatta filled with my caricatures, and creases when I would tie the ends to the benches to avoid any movement.

That was what our friendship was all about, ill one day, we talked so much that the teacher got our seats changed, and Linda stole her away from me, into a world where only intimacy existed, only relationships existed. I tried to bring her back into the path yet in vain, I knew she found life interesting, my little innocent Rachel was perhaps still innocent, she never understood that Linda had taken her to a different world instead, from where, getting back was impossible.
Rachel never understood me, and I found myself entangled between trying to save her and tolerating what people started to think about me as her too. I knew there was no coming back. I looked back to see those memories spent with her, and then Rachel and Linda together, with weird people around.
I shuddered and made up my mind not to think about her. I resumed working on the computer, thinking, "Friendship rarely stays, friends come and go."