1 A JOURNEY THROUGH MEMORIES

I rang the bell of my friends house and took two steps back so that he could see who it was from the terrace of his house, I also give him a call on his mobile so that he knows that it was me who rang the bell. As i was listening to the beep from my mobile i looked up and found his mom looking at me. I didn't need to introduce myself to her, She knew i was a friend of her son. After a couple minutes he opened the door, freshly dressed he looked at me with a wide smile on his face:

"You ready" He said. He seemed more exited than i thought he would be. "As i'll ever be" I replied.

We were going to visit the school we used to go to about six years ago.

It wasn't very far away from his house so we decided we would go on foot. It was three in the evening and the road we were walking on was baking in the sun. Instead of going through the shorter way, we decided to go around the town through the route we used to take when we were still student, studying at the same school. We would have to walk an extra half-kilometre but for us it was just an additional ride through the memories we were dreading to re-visit.

The first thought that came to my mind when were on the route was about the backpack. I suddenly felt an imaginary weight on my shoulders and my hands under the straps. My head automatically started to look around, at the houses and some ground that was still left there, empty. Most of the plots on our route had been built upon. It looked a lot different the what it was when were kids but still tortuously the same. The memories were coming back, not all of them , but one at a time, giving me some time to take then in slowly.

Drowning in them and taking a bath in a pool of memories we kept walking, we were soo lost in ourselves that we forgot to talk or share our experience, probably because they were almost the same.

Finally the school came into view, It was a three story building, painted the usual faded dull yellow almost every school preferred on its walls. It was bigger than most school these day, a proper school. A school that always had more room for extra students.

We reached the front door, The guard let us in after we lied that were were here for our little brothers admission. He gave us a mean nod and we were through the gates. The memories came once again not one at a time but like a flood. Overwhelmed, a small laugh automatically escaped my mouth. The big ground came first, i could easily picture myself along with almost a thousand other students walking through the same path towards our classes or towards the ground, if we were early.

Both of us started in kindergarten and stayed here till 7th grade. we walked through the ground staying on the rough, well-used gravel. As soon as i stepped inside the building i had to stop and take some very deep breath not because we were exhausted but because we were being treated with the usual smell that came from almost every school. A mixture of chalk, dust, chatter and oddly mingled perfumes the teacher wore, intensified by the heat of the day. If we weren't overwhelmed with memories before, we were now. I could almost see my little-self walking through the same corridor i was standing in right now with an over-weighted bag on both my shoulders. I remembered the color of my bag, it was blue. I used that bag for almost three years until it's straps broke and the color almost faded away. I remembered the little worries i had which were not very little six years ago. The worries of the upcoming test or the worries of that one teacher who was never happy with you even if you'd brought him a chest full of treasures. The only thing he or she cared about was the homework, If you didn't do it, you were in serious trouble.

There were ten classes on each floor and we peeked through each and every one. We never realized who fixed all the desks in order after we'd ruined them on our way out of the class after the last bell. Now we did. There were two peons who were doing the very thing when we entered our eighth class on the ground floor. I'd studied in almost every class on every floor. They changed it when we entered a new class after our summer vacations.

Me and my friend both went to the top floor, Where the class was where we had last studied. We entered the class the desks were the same, i touched them with my hand to feel them, i sat on one, my friend sat on another and we laughed. We laughed like seven graders, like one of the imaginary student in the class had said something very funny. We laughed like someone had just told the class that their teacher was absent. No test. We laughed like the teacher had decided to skip the test today. We laughed like we did on the last day of our school. We laughed until there were tears in our eyes, we laughed until we could laugh no more and we enjoyed every moment of it.

We basically came to the school because we thought we had forgotten it, the smell or the memories or what it felt like to be a little child again, but we hadn't. They were all at the back of my head all this time, i only had to think a little more to get there. If i ever got a chance to go back to that time where my biggest worry was the upcoming test, I would dive into it without a thought. If there was one thing i learned that day, it was that time moves on, memories don't. Every human being is a collection of their past experiences, our past defines up, it makes us, us.