If friends are special, friendship is even more special. I have always defined friends as flowers and life metaphorically a vase. Just like each flower is different in color, fragrance and type, you put them all together in a Vase; it makes a perfect thing of beauty. And like John Keats says, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’.

I had incidentally once been to some musical show and as a filler the compere spoke a line which I can never forget all my life. He said in Marathi and the English translation to it goes like this “There was a poor man few years back whom I knew was broke and he earned just 2 shillings for a living, and everyday he bought just 2 things to survive the day through. With one shilling he bought food to live and with the other he bought a flower which showed him the reason to live.”

What a thought! That poor old man could be broke, but he was rich with his thoughts.

A flower stays for like few hours and dries away, but it gives treat for your eyes every single minute you spend staring at its beauty. Not to forget the fragrance that calms down every nerve in your body.

Everyday chaos, the traffic, piles of work at your desk or desktop, pulling off a corporate behavior that keeps you in the job than the work itself is all one thing and coming back home to the one you love, or the bunch of friends who make you feel special or make you just be you is another. That’s one such healing effect love and friendship can rub off on you.

Then there is another twist in the tale, sad but true, when the flower dries, what next? Another set of flowers to stimulate your eyes and nerves? Yeah, may be that! Or may be find out the essence of what even a dried flower has to tell.

Everything that’s beautiful comes with a timeline and no matter how much you water the flowers or caress with what not so that they don’t dry… they still do and when they do, they get to go where they belong, the garbage bin. Otherwise they stink up the whole place, and make the vase look miserable. The vase is meant to beautify the place; and the place here is metaphoric to be you. No matter how much you cherished the flowers, there is always a set time period to it and post that time it gets stinky and ugly and we don’t want that so much for the flowers at least. The point I want to make here is that even friends and loved ones have a vase of there own and we are the flowers decorated in them and we may get stinky or clingy too trying to stink up their place.  That’s when we know, we got to give the space and time.

I am not intending to be sarcastic or depressing, but the most important lesson that I learnt here is that, you get to water the flowers and freshen them up and if it’s dried you got to move on because that way at least you get to keep their magical effect on you and lingering fragrance than nullify it by the stink.

Just like how it’s important to have a best friend who gives you a shoulder to cry on and laughs like hell at your not so funny jokes. Friends and loved ones may need the same and you just have to thank God for being the one they need. Apart from sharing happiness and sorrows there is another part to friendship, though hard, sometimes the Best gift you can give to your close friend is space and time, especially when you know he/she needs it! You've got to let go.