Adieu mon amie, je t'aimais bien

Its not something anyone wants to do, but saying goodbyes is undeniable & inevitable.

Some goodbyes are final and come with varying kinds of grief (or relief), while some goodbyes are temporary with a chance (however fleeting) of turning into a hello somewhere, someday.
But what about the goodbyes that we stretch out, like goodbyes that signal end of relationships.

So many of us hang on to some slim hope that what we shared with someone else will survive. We hang on desperately in the hopes of recreating past highs together, while the ghosts of lows haunt us from the edge of memory.

We are addicts who are at the wrong end of the addiction - not riding high on a new buzz but trying every trick to get the buzz back.Love is an addiction at the best of times. This is true for the feeling itself or the idea of it & sometimes, the hope of the feeling is the high itself.

We have millions of songs, books and poems about the grief, loss and sometimes joy & freedom that goodbyes are often accompanied by. There is a bittersweet release in the act of letting go; whether welcome or otherwise. This is an universal phenomenon, wholly complete in its humanity.

But I am letting go of myself, the versions of myself that lived in the past. The girl who couldn't grow up fast enough, the girl who was bullied and abused. That is not to say I didn't have a happy childhood, my parents loved me as best they could, my sister gave me everything she could. But I was just not capable of being the person I wanted to be -- like many tweens and teens both before & after me. I have been many versions of that person, many I didn't like, many I am ashamed of. I guess they are right when they say that childhood is wasted on the young.

It is today as I look back on my mistakes, I am trying to let go of the person I used to be in order to really be what I can be. I am saying goodbye to the small infinities that made up my past and looking forward to the infinite infinities ahead.

I am doing it in part with the help of my job that I love, understanding how I feel about how I look & surrounding myself with people who accept me without judgement. I am also trying to feel less like an impostor who is waiting to get caught. I am learning to like myself and accept my drawbacks and grow on my strengths. Love is still elusive but I am hopeful that if I am lucky to find it, I will be ready for it.

So this is both a goodbye & a hello, a goodbye to the neurosis of the past and a hello to the insanity of the future. 

Dancing with monsters through the night

I've met many of the demons of the past. Some I live with everyday, some are part of me. There are others I struggle to forget and yet others that I struggle to bury in the recesses of my cluttered brain. I mostly succeed & living in denial of these demons works on almost all days.

But every once in a while, they refuse to be pushed down & I have to face them head on. And invariably, I become the person I was when those demons first overwhelmed me. Its like a unwanted surprise trip back in time. I remember my vulnerabilities & become my insecurities & fold into myself. Its not something I have any choice or will power over; because if I did, trust me I'd choose any other mental disease over the threat of these demons.

Its easy to judge me; I wear my heart on my sleeve. I will do anything for you if I like you & I will gently excuse myself from your life if I don't like you. I am open, honest to the point of rude & straight forward. But that also means I can't maintain a charade of things being right when they're not. I will still be smiling but I will have no idea who the smile is aimed for. 

Even today, I know the world is still spinning as it should with everyone trying to kill everyone else. But in my head, I'm back in college as an insecure girl with ambition but no plans or goals. Being taken advantage of, being lied to, being naive and not caring about how easy it is to get your heart broken. I'm battling my demons of the time I was in an abusive relationship because I thought that was what I deserved. 

But we're all older & wiser now, or atleast we pretend we are. Imagination is a tool that comes in handy when you're trying to rewind & play & fast forward the video tape that is your life. 

Onwards towards regrets

Heat waves

Spiral in the sun

Red clouds

Come undone

Sea of sand

Oceans in still life

Change without changing

Move in all directions

The past in your head 

The future in your hands

The life you left behind 

Pushing you onward 

-- Jason Eisenmenger 'Mojave'

Whether it is the fear of history repeating itself that drives you, or running away from the past or even the determination to 'never go hungry again'; the past is always present in our future. Take That sang about never forgetting where they're coming from and Beyonce sang what goes around, comes back around. Whatever genre of music tickles your fancy, the past is always too much with us.

There are these constant struggles within when my memories threaten to become my reality and I have to shake my head in an attempt to reboot. Sometimes this works, the other times I have to shake some more or shut down for a while. I don't want to be the irresponsible girl anymore. I want to grow up, have consequences, be answerable, take control and have regrets because of the decisions I have made.

They say the best life is one without regrets & I've always been proud of never having a single one. But on the flip side is the fact that regrets happen because you took firm control of your life and dictated terms. Don't regret usually stem from the fact that you stood up for your convictions and didn't get the best outcome? Atleast you stood for something, even if it was during a movie and everyone was yelling at you to sit down again.

I have always made decisions thinking that if I don't do this or that, I will regret it in the future. But now, I am beginning to see the idea of short-term regrets and long-term payoffs. I refuse to just let go of my past, I want to carry those experiences and regrets with me as I try and mould my own future. I know in the bigger scheme of things, one human life is hardly worth a footnote, but it is the story of my life. I want to make sure that I do the very best with it, because who else will? 

I know these foot prints I leave behind are in a sea of sand but atleast I will always knew they existed.

Hindsight canonizes the demons of my past

Ever had a conversation with someone who is delving into your shared past but somehow you're thinking, "That's not how I remember it!"? In my personal opinion, while fact may be stranger than fiction, memories are always so much stranger. They stick around like unreliable & unwanted acquaintances who always seem to be right there, in the periphery of your subconscious.

Neurologically speaking, memories are nothing but a shoot of energy and chemicals. But man, do they hold power over us. A simple scent or a reflection in the corner can take you back decades in a single instant. The trick is being able to know that you can't stay there -- how much ever you may want to. 

That's the marvelous part of hind sight; somehow like magic, you only remember the reasons you wanted to stay & not the reasons you wanted to leave. You remember the funny things they did but not how much they annoyed you. In fact, if you're lucky, you remember the smiles so clearly that maybe, just for a minute, you forget the tears. Sometimes its just so easy to hold on to the best parts of our history & use them to canonize the demons of the past. 

We can easily remember the castles of sand but not how long it took to make them or how they were swept away in the first wave. Isn't that so much easier than reliving the heartbreak & the sadness (which is usually locked away in a different corner of the heart)?

Somehow, for me, the most interesting part of it all is how people seem to remember us. As I grow older I see that people don't necessarily hang on to the last or the best memory of a person. Its usually just a random moment, something said without much thought, something the sub-conscious didn't really register as a landmark at all.

People remember me by something I said to them in school, or by something I did in college or by a weird little remark I made about life. So many times, these examples have not even stuck around in my mind & the fact that they define me for someone else is, in equal parts, unnerving & humbling. 

The memories I hold on to dearly are all about people that have come to my life & touched it in some way or the other. But the best memories aren't always the most elaborate or the most well-planned. It could be a smile, a simple touch or a kind word. As I wrote in a long-forgotten poem once, "Its not about the money, its not about the fame. It is about how many people smile when they remember your name."