Au revoir amigo.

Assy's leaving. For real.

I am happy and proud. He's finally out of that miserable job and heading to do the thing he is best at. There are very few people that I have come across in my time who are as immensely talented as that guy and if anyone deserves that job in Dubai, its him. Besides I want him to go so that he'll also serve as a useful contact out there to smuggle back stuff for me.

On a more serious note, I can't help but feel sorry for myself. Amongst all the people I have in my life, he's the only one that I would call to talk to. I guess its because he's the only one with whom I've felt a kinship like I've never found with anyone else. I can't even count the number of nights that we whiled away discussing topics ranging from movies to books, games to earthworms, Godfather to Pink Panther, friends to lovers and everything in between.

It's never been a mushy or senti friendship, ours. Just a very close and simple one. And now he'll be gone. Sure, there'll be phones and e-mails and all the crap. Only it won't be enough. Not nearly enough. Because he'll no longer be able to call me at weird times in the night and demand that I entertain him. And I'll no longer get to message him at odd hours to describe some funny incident of my day. And I most certainly won't have anyone to address my male related queries to.

Dammit!

Why can't I trust easily like most normal people? Why do I have to hold out until I pick one person in a thousand and then bare my soul? Every time I make the unfortunate mistake of getting used to letting someone in, he has to go away. Not just to another city or state but to a country half way across the world.

It's happened so many times that one would expect that I'd have gotten immune to it by now. Somehow, I don't. It hurts just as much each and every time. This time though, I don't even know how to be feeling or more accurately, how to stop feeling.

PS : I want to be going away someplace too. But on second and a more selfish thought, will it even make a difference to anybody? Never mind. It sounds too much like looking for compliments more than a stray thought anyway.

Dirty little secret.

When a realization dawns, it’s a funny feeling. Kinda like déjà vu. Suddenly, everything falls into place and begins to make sense. Self realizations are even more so. They just sort of hit you out of the blue and nothing’s ever the same again. I had something like that happen to me today.

So you know how All American Rejects' “Dirty Little Secret” uses the Post Secret projectg. It has me hooked. In a nut shell, it’s a forum where people from all walks of life send across self-made post cards with their inner most secrets etched on them. Most of these send anonymously while others don't. Either which way, a majority of them are honest-to- god confessions and there in lay the appeal of the whole thing.

The thing that particularly interested me about it all is that these cards don’t talk about actions. They are about thoughts. What it translates into is that most of us are not as afraid of the things we’ve done so much as we are of the thoughts that we have thought. A lot of the times we build walls in our heads to keep from having to acknowledge the vileness of our thoughts so that we can sleep soundly at night, pretending they didn’t exist. Few have the courage to face up to the truth of their thoughts.

So, for the past few days, I’ve been wondering about the effectiveness of the whole project. Today, it occurred to me out of nowhere that it doesn’t matter. I’m not one of these select few and that, I prefer the self- delusional version of everything that concerns me to the factual one. Also, I think that whether we face up to them or not, secrets and confessions are best left to brew in the confines of the mind. That way they’ll never need be judged by another.