According to Wikipedia, ‘Pangaea’ is the supercontinent that existed before the earth split into its current continent configuration some 250 million years ago. It also goes onto say that the earth is in the habit of doing this random drifting apart and shifting around every 300-400 million years.
And at each point we have managed to come up with names to describe it, Gondwanaland, Pannotia, Rodinia… the list goes on. How anyone comes up with these numbers and postulates is anyone’s guess and I’m pretty sure I sound daft and nerdy as I go on about something very irrelevant to anything today. Do bear with me, I have a point. You see, when there was a combined landmass everyone lived together, continents which are now separate, then overlapped to form common ground. Everyone lived on the same piece of land. There was no divergent evolution or natural selection, no survival of the fittest or random elimination. Therefore, my best friend and I have come to the conclusion that the origins of our friendship were somewhat like that, until that fateful day when the continental drift decided to come along, aka graduation. Yes, the continental drift did also cause an intermingling of populations and a division of pre-existing populations due to tectonic plate shifts resulting in many of the hypothesis that Charles Darwin and Mr Lamarck liked to throw around. However, for friends such as mine, it rendered our life a bit chaotic and more than a little lonely. On opposite corners of the world in completely different external environments, we now had to adapt to circumstances previous unforeseen and to a good extent, unwanted. Our routines diverged and so did our communication. Add to that a long list of limiting factors such as time difference, internet inconsistencies, the issue of paying to talk on the phone, living you current life as well as holding onto the good old Pangaean times, new people, new food, the obligatory growing up etc, and you get the perfect recipe for being friend-sick. That’s right. Here’s a sickness that’s not given as much care and attention as compared to “love-sickness”. We speak on end about long distance relationships, of the separation of love which is meant to be together. But what of two friends sitting miles, oceans and continents away from each other, staring at a computer screen waiting for a word, a phrase or chat conversation with their significant other. What of the heart break you feel when the video freezes, or the voice get cut, when the bars on the internet signal plunge down, when the computer decides to be dodgy, when the phone line goes dead because you’ve run out of money, when you’re greeted with missed calls instead of a familiar face, when sending the package costs more than what’s in it, when in a country like India it just ends up getting lost anyway…. What of those chuddy-buddies, those brother’s-in-arms, those homie-G’s, those machas, those roommates and dorm mates and classmates, those people that made up your day, and marked your calenders. What happens when they end up like those continents separated by seas of… everything!? It takes time and effort to keep it up, to keep it going, to keep in touch. It’s harder to be there for someone, and it’s also harder not to think about how it ‘used to be’ and what ‘could’ve been’ instead of focusing on what is and has to be done. As my friend and I do absurd things to overcome the time difference, from downing tons of coffee and green tea to having showers to stay awake, one this is for sure, we will come together. Maybe physically, like the earth does every so often (note: 300-400 million years) or maybe and most probably, mentally, in that way we look to the future, for better things are definitely to come. It something like the commonality between the Tasmanian Wolf (a marsupial found off the coast of Australia) and the Placental wolf (found on the mainland)… although they were victims in separation of the continental drift, and were subjected to various different environments that they were required to adapt to in order to survive, the end product, i.e., the current species of the same, are not very different. Yes, they appear different and function differently but their purpose is still the same; to hunt and survive. Forgive the crude simile, for we all seek to do more than hunt and survive in life, but in essence the mechanism is parallel. Because when my friend and I saw each other a couple of days ago after almost 8 months not having been around each other, we picked up as though we were in the middle of a conversation we hadn’t finished. Although we’re separated by different cultures and lifestyles and oceans and what not else, we still are and always will be, Pangaeans.
