A Blast From The Past

Talk about the best of both worlds.

At the risk of crude sentimentality, I'd say I had an amazing time last night.

On the blue corner, my old friends.
On the red corner, my new friends.

All of them are now, officially, friends-in-law.

My old friends:
a) Sheriff Ahmed (of Who Shot The Sheriff fame), an old classmate
b) Muneer Taleb, also an old classmate
c) Ahmed Selim, an old classmate of my brother Zen
d) Dudut, a very good friend of my whole male posse

Muneer was quoting an old saying, "Mountains never meet, but people do." Mother of all surprises, I AM NOT A MOUNTAIN. I haven't seen Muneer and Sheriff in 9 years. We used to spend N hundred hours couped up in a Filipino-dominated classroom. Introducing them to my new friends was quite the experience. On the one hand, these are people who know everything about me; I do not have a single memory of my whole childhood and tweenhood that didn't have them in the background somewhere. There is no space or need for any kind of pretension with them. We shared high-school teachers, lame jokes, minor discrimination, and eggheadism. That's enough to sustain a relationship.

On the other hand, my new friends are just beginning to see other sides of me. Incredulity is not uncommon. Yes, I was a monster. Yes, I used to beat up boys and girls. Yes, I used to laugh at peoples faces. No, I wasn't always nice and all-brown-sugar-ish.

We all met at the Serafi Megamall. The little impromptu reunion started with the boys calling me to fetch them at the Danube supermarket. I was their only ticket to that glitzy glamour-world called Malling. As per contempo-Saudi tradition, young men are not allowed into the malls without the supervision of their female counterparts. After the prerequisite gasping and you've-gained-so-much-weight comments, the walk down memory lane commences. We talk about dorky days and even dorkier school-people, laughed at former red-faced moments, and tsk-tsked about how we turned out.

Yeah, it's funny how things turn out. And funny how things don't.

People do change. But how much of us has changed?