Dear Blogger,

I think Blogger is the easiest way to really see what and who you've turned into from what you were. It's the easiest way of forgetting people you met here and meeting people you never knew.
I have been blogging for the last seven years. That's a big number for me because youth often underestimates the potentiality of big numbers. The concept of 'long run' is often not so long and sometimes arrogantly short sighted.

In the last seven years of blogging, I remember deleting just one post in 2009. Apart from that, whatever I wrote was as good as set on stone because irrespective of the horrible grammar and the strange SMS language that was a fad once, I had no regrets about the person I used to be. In fact, it used to be amusing and at some level comforting. I was a good kid, and I think I managed to grow into a decent-ish human being. But a few days back I did delete a whole lot of posts from the oldest of chests on this blog (2008). I reverted them back to drafts; not because I was embarrassed by what a ridiculously hyper, unabashedly emotional teenager I was. I deleted those posts because I couldn't relate to them anymore. Perhaps sudden minutes of retrospect dab figments of epiphanies in you. Perhaps it was like that one fine day you wake up and decide to quit your job because you forgot why you started working in the first place.
It just had to be done.

You see, back when I wrote them, Blogger was an entirely different world. My list of Followers and Followings were this intimate circle where we trusted absolute strangers with our potent feelings about everything. Back then it was 'milestones' like the first day of my higher secondary schooling, or the longest spell of crush on a boy. For others it was family, work, and much bigger milestones. Some of these people became the kinds of friends who till date keep in touch and genuinely matter. I remember being the baby of the blogger circle.
It was absolutely beautiful how a bunch of URLs could mean so much to people who perhaps lived in different cities/ countries and yet knew overwhelmingly enough about each other.

But eventually over the years, everyone got busy. People moved. People moved on, too. A lot of the blogs I used to religiously follow are now not accessible anymore because they've either turned private or the last time they were updated was two or three years back.
I sure do miss those guys. They were good people and I hope they're all in good health.

I've had years like 2011 when I'd write so often that drafts over drafts piled on my dashboard, waiting to be published. I've had years like 2013 where I had so much to write that words failed me, and all I could manage was crawl up to 13 posts in a year. I've zoned out and zoned in, I've had painful spells of writers block and even worse spells of sheer laziness. But I kept coming back here. Because somehow I knew that somebody would be listening. And if it was a lucky day, somebody would be waiting.

 I have to admit, Blogger still surprises me. In waves of blue moons, once in a while I see old blogger friends leave a comment on a post when I least expect it. Even today, I bump into wonderful blogs of people I want to know better because their words make a lot of sense, they hit home. I'm thankful for such people sustaining the art and the need of writing. Some times I come so close to deleting this blog, but I think I've seen myself and others grow too much in this space to give it all away. Like I said, seven years is a big number for me.

So to all of you who are still writing, to all of you who stopped writing, and most importantly to all of you who never stopped reading- this is a sincere white flag for all of you, to let you know that our boat is still sailing and the ocean still looks just as beautiful. The air is thick with salt, but the words don't fail to come out in sneezes. :)

Cheers, Blogger. You've been a good listener.

All my loving,
Nil.