when you least expect it.

I spoke with my friend Rosa tonight.
I met her years ago, in 1998, in a small town in southern India.
We were practically the same person - physical resemblance aside, we shared the same dreams, ideals, and beliefs. There is no one else who knows as much about me and has been with me through my worst moments.
Our families spent as much time together as possible during those years I lived in India. If not for her family, liberal and open minded as they are, I am certain that I would have suffocated under the oppressive atmosphere that is so characteristic of India.
As kids who grew up with physicians as parents, our intertwined dream was to become pediatricians, to share a large home - dreams that only kids dream of. In the end, we went our separate paths - she to law school, I to medical - and our lives drifted outwards, in different directions and yet we lived our lives, unknowingly, in parallel.
Her grandfather died at the same time my grandpa did - their funerals were on the same day. Neither knew of the other's loss; we struggled with the same grief and change in ways we never thought we would and yet all the while, worlds apart.
I spoke with her tonight. I see how little has changed between us - our lives run in parallel, our dreams as well. When I tell her of my plan to quit and become a teacher, she is shocked. Only yesterday, she says, she has shared this idea with another friend. We have become disillusioned with the whole process of education and the paths that we've taken but ultimately, we both decide - as we already have - that quitting may be a mistake and we both agree that we will work for a few years, fill up our bank accounts and "branch out", see where life takes us. It's not that we're not ambitious; we are, just in a different sense. We see life as something different - not a cycle perhaps, but a line, with an end. No propagation, no perpetuation. To live, to make a difference, to forget rituals and set patterns.

I hope we will be reunited. I hope that we will soon pick up where we left off so many years ago. That we will share dreams and hopes and ideals. That we will dip our feet in a swirling river, eat chunks of white chocolate, tell tales of fairies and giants, make leafy hobbit-like homes, and be the best of friends that we've been, even in all these years apart.