Change.

The thing I hate worst in the world is change. You get into a routine, a rhythm, you know from the moment you get up what you’re gonna do all day, and you feel secure. Not for me the adventure of not knowing where you’ll end up by the end of the day. Give me the choice of walking into a familiar environment, getting myself a cup of coffee that has tasted the same for the last two years, greeting the same people in the same way every morning -- and you’re looking at one happy woman.

But due to an unfortunate giddy moment of adventurism, I started a chain of events that got me a new job…

And now I’m sitting here serving my notice which feels more like a final countdown to a painful period of uncertainty…new desk, new people, new coffee. I felt this torn only once before, when I resolved to leave the comfortable womb of my home town, Calcutta to start a new life all the way across India in Hyderabad. I was attached in the most unhealthy fashion to my family, and most of my college friends there, and I didn’t have a job, or a home in the new city…all I knew was my heart was in Hyderabad and I had to follow it.

College had been a dream…attending the classes I felt like, hanging out by the jheel, the hilarious things me and my close group of friends got up to those five years…I was inconsolable that I would have to leave. But leave I did.

Now, some four years later…though I carry my heart with me more or less, I feel a familiar turmoil at this decision I’ve taken. I think the hardest part about leaving a job you love is that YOU have taken the decision…and can blame no one else (not that I won’t try) if things don’t work out later on. Every time I look around at my desk I wish that I could see it a month from hence. Every face I look at I wish wasn’t only for the last few weeks, every time I laugh at a joke a friend has cracked I wish I didn’t have to wonder if I’d ever hear that particular brand of humour ever again.

People tell me I’ll make new friends again… call me unreasonable, but I would pick friends I already have and love over the ones yet to be made.

Life is very unfair in that what’s good for you is rarely what you want to do. So here I am packing up my two-year old life here…a few more days to go…having extra-long lunches with friends and making plans of meeting after we part ways.

The only thing that consoles me is that I am still fast friends with most of my college mates, and that maybe life has intended me to be lucky with respect to friends.

So I shall harden my heart and move on, lest life passes me by. And I’ll let you know about my friends in a year or two…

:)