Afridi ke Nakhray: Let Afridi be Afridi

THIS LIFE.(Features)

Daily Mail (London) January 23, 2010 Byline: MARISA MACKLE W hen I was very young I met a man who was quite old. I was holidaying alone at a hotel abroad and so was he. There were just a few people staying in the hotel. Being sociable, I used to arrange for all the guests to meet in the bar after dinner every evening.

The night before I came home I took everyone’s details and promised to write. The old man and I also swapped contact details. ‘Will you write?’ I asked. website christmas card sayings

‘Probably not,’ he said. ‘I find that people whom you meet on holidays rarely keep in touch.’ At least he was honest.

Oddly enough, I did hear from him about a year later. He sent a Christmas card but the other hotel guests who had sworn they would keep in touch forever, never did.

Now that I’m older I understand why people don’t keep in touch. It’s not that they don’t mean to but life has a habit of getting in the way, they go about their own business, meet other people and then they forget all about you.

The other day I found an old address book. I thought I had better copy down a few contact details from it before throwing it out. But as I flicked through it, I realised sadly that I don’t keep in touch with ninety per cent of those contacts. Even worse, I genuinely couldn’t remember who half the folk attached to these telephone numbers were.

Since that holiday, back when I was seventeen years old and trying to act like some kind of Pollyanna by encouraging all these random hotel guests to unwittingly become lifelong pen pals, I have realised that some friendships aren’t meant to last forever.

At least break-ups at the end of love affairs are more clean cut. With boyfriends you have ‘the talk’ which is never very pleasant, but at least you get closure. You get your hair cut, lose weight, move on, and then try and meet somebody else. With friendships, however, you rarely get closure. You don’t turn around to a pal and say, ‘Look, it’s not you, it’s me.’ It’s more gradual, more drawn out.

There’s no big fight or drama. You just stop phoning one another quite so often. The texts become less frequent and eventually dwindle away to nothing. Nights out together become a thing of the past. Then she sends you a Christmas card saying you should meet up. And you send one back in agreement. But nothing is subsequently arranged. She might add you as a Facebook friend, but then you realise she has a thousand other online friends and so it doesn’t really count. It turns out that you have both moved on. in our site christmas card sayings

Some people seem to have a knack of going through life picking people up and dropping them depending on the season, or what job they’re in, who they’re married to, or what area they live in.

I’m not one of those people. Maybe it’s because my star sign is Cancer and as any follower of astrology knows, Cancer’s symbol is the crab. Crabs love to cling to the past. They find it near impossible to let go.

If I had my way, I would keep in touch with every person I have ever met in my life and found that I liked. I feel very awkward sitting on a plane and chatting to a stranger for five hours all about my life and then standing up at the end of it, shaking their hand and wishing them luck. To me, it’s a surreal experience.

I often feel like saying to them, ‘Is that it? I’ve told you all about myself and now you’re going to go off and pick up your luggage, walk out of the airport and never give me a second thought again? Why don’t we organise to fly the same flight home so we can talk some more?’ I know I need to stop obsessing over other people’s apparently inexplicable ability to move on. I recently received a text from an ex-boyfriend out of the blue. He ended the text communique with the words ‘Take care’. I analysed the message to death. Take care? Was that another way of saying ‘Good luck’? Did this mean that he had taken the time to get in touch only to tell me to go away and have a nice life? And why did it matter so much anyway? I sometimes think the French and Germans say it better when they say ‘Au Revoir’ and ‘Auf Wiedersehen’. It’s more optimistic than our curt ‘Goodbye’.

These days, I often find myself thinking about that old man from my holiday all those years ago. I still have his Christmas card because I can never throw anything away (well, perhaps the odd obsolete address book…). I wonder if he’s still alive. I would love to tell him he was right about people not keeping in touch. Maybe he’s on Facebook… Marisa Mackle’s latest book is Living Next Door to Alice (published by Little Black Dress).