Writing on the bench...

You know how you used to doodle stuff on your bench during those soporific lectures, where you would try to stab yourself in the eye with a pen just to make things more interesting?...Yeah, those. The scribbles ranged from the initials of your crush to the lyrics of some random emo song which you thought described your love life the best then. A couple of days back I stumbled upon the bench which I had sat on last year and found my doodles along with hundreds of other people's. There was my name (obviously) amongst a million of others, a line from open your eyes, which somebody had cut and written "jagya rulessss" on (....eeeyeah..), then there was a head, which looked like cross between the hulk and C3PO, but I guess that was the beauty of that head, it's non resemblance to any sort of living being, which gave people the license (creative of course) to label it as whichever professor/ girl/boy/backstreet boy they disliked the most. Then there were those doodles which were a constant fixture at every table, like the summer of 69' lyrics (always, always that one), a lot of ansty f***k yous and f***k off (for no apparent reason), a group of names with 'we rule/ rock' written all around them, a something which at a certain angle looks like a hand giving the finger, the sprinking of 'Zzzzzzzzzs' all over the bench, and names and more names, squeezed in everywhere.

It made me realize those scribbles on the benches are probably the best documentation of our growing up memories. Not the pretty pictures or grainy videos, not the drawing books filled with crayon scribbles, not the dusty Enid Blytons and Nancy Drews lying forgotten among the crisp Asimovs and Sheldons...It's those absent minded doodles...

Of zig zags and spirals,

and little stars and birds.

Of tiny hearts and sad songs,

and disconnected words...