To my childhood friends

A very old friend commented on my blog saying he found my blog posts very depressing (he also said that he wanted to throw me off the 20th floor of a building but that story I will share another day). He suggested that I should change the tone of my posts so that people don't try to kill themselves after reading them. So I decided to comply and dug out some beautiful memories from my childhood.
When I first started school there was no concept of playgroups, which meant that we were about three when we went to school. The first day of school was tough; there was severe separation anxiety on both sides. I was howling because I didn't want to let go of my father's hand and he was upset because he couldn't bear to see me cry. There came a point that day when he wanted to take me back home and never send me to school. But we both knew how my mother would react to that. Thank God she wasn't with us that day to witness my tantrums. Anyways, when I finally settled down, a fair girl with ebony ringlets caught my attention. She seemed so cheerful that I felt a little ashamed of myself. Here I was acting like a cry baby while she seemed to be enjoying this weird place called school. Soon after that Malahat and I became good friends, very good friends, and it was much later that Mehnaz and Waheela joined us. I switched schools after four years but till I was there, we would hang out together every single day at school and the chats, the wait for our turn on the swings, and everything else that we did together became a part of my memories for the years to come.
Then started a new phase of my life at the new school.Soon I found new friends Zehra and Erum, who turned out to be great fun; showing me around the huge campus, the beautiful gardens, the church, the grand yellow-brick buildings and the 'haunted' hockey field. Together we explored the vast grounds as we enjoyed fresh cones from 'Abdullah's tuck shop'. Incidentally, we were also in the same college and though we made new friends and had different classes, we stayed in touch throughout.
But my most dear friend turned out to be the curly-haired boy who lived next door. When I was about nine, we moved into a new house.The family next door shared a wall with us. By that I mean that if we wanted to talk, we could do so from over the wall. Yasir started coming to the birthday parties that my mother would throw for me and my brother, joining in the fun, wearing the ridiculous conical party hats (and yes I still have some photographs of him staring at the cake). Anyways, soon we started playing together as we were the same age but it was much later that he and I became such good friends; exchanging 'game n watch'(our version of PSP and Gameboy), tagging along with his older sister in the rain, sailing our flip-flops in the puddles pretending they were boats and teasing each other. He was the one who introduced me to the art of selective studying and later helped me master it (of course the fact that I started getting better grades than him didn't do much for his ego). He was also the one who helped me throughout school and college with my Urdu and also made guess papers for me which turned out to be so close to the actual exam papers that I started suspecting him of stealing them. For many, many years we stayed good friends and still are and I know that if ever I need someone to fall back upon, he'll just be a phone call away. So this one's to the boy next door who stayed my true friend throughout!