It's time to be a big girl now...

What astonishes me the most is how nothing around me seems to change. The world goes on unfeeling, unmoved, the way it's always been, oblivious of the changes that occur inside us. Most times I don't notice it because who even has time to think given the busy busy schedules we've made for ourselves? But sometimes, when my brain is stuffy because of the suffocating Karachi heat or my family arguing over something or the other, I escape to the rooftop. It's not much of a view. Just a whole bunch of old apartment buildings towering above me, a deserted mall missing some of the glass panes in its roof on the street opposite, my favourite neem tree that just grows and grows regardless of the weather and my neighbours' palms, the Commecs sign blinking blue and white from far away. That's pretty much it but it's beautiful enough for me. I start thinking about where I am, who I am, and what I've become in the past couple of years and I can't believe it. I can't believe things used to be different. There was a time when we were all just kids in school, only worried about tests and exams which always seemed to be far enough away, when we were young enough to ignore society and its obligations altogether, when everyone who I knew was still alive-My grandfather's brother, my grandfather's cousin (who lost his life only recently), his son(who passed away a couple of years before his father), Osama Sabir Chhipa, my tuition sir Bhaemeah..and well, the list goes on- and when the prospect of losing friends or people was impossible to fathom. And I can't believe the tree across from me is the same, the light from the streetlamp bounces off its leaves the way its always done, its the same empty rooftop with the same old watertank, this could be an evening from two years ago and nobody would be able to tell the difference. But damn it, I can. I can't ignore the fact that everything is startlingly different. And I guess that's what hurts the most.

But nostalgia is pointless, isn't it? It brings nothing back. You can drown in it and forget to move ahead. Hell, you don't want to move ahead at all, because thinking about the past too much makes you develop a taste for a dangerous bitter-sweetness that can become impossible to resist. I've been there, and it leads nowhere. I gave Big Girls Don't Cry by Fergie a proper listen the other day, and it was the first time I appreciated it as much as I do now. Yup, that's what it means to be a big girl.