Ana Iris once asked me if I loved him and I
told her about the lights in my old home in the capital, how they flickered and
you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you
waited and couldn’t do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told
her, is how I feel. — Junot Diaz, This is How You Lose Her
Sometimes
when I look at the kitten who followed me home, I wonder what brought us
together. She was starved, half-alive, having survived a harsh subzero winter
yet she still battled each day and one day followed me across 20 minutes of
frozen terrain.She was — is — a wild one. A ferocious, independent, and keenly
intelligent creature. Maybe, in this way, she is only myself in animal form.
At times,
though, I cannot help but look at her and wonder if it is possible for a human
to come back as an animal. Often, when she plays soccer with her bell-ball for
hours on end, I am reminded of the brother I lost so many years ago. He, too,
was a dark and quiet creature, and spent hours playing solitaire foot hockey
with a tennis ball.
Or, at
those times when I feel her jagged tongue scratching away at my cheek, licking
away my tears, I wonder if she is my mother; watching over me while I sleep.
In this
way, I often find telling traits for many of those I have lost, and perhaps
this is all transference of various internal feelings and thoughts that I do
not dare allow myself to dwell on.
It is around this time that I observe the loss of the most important person in my life. The
pain of that loss is as ever crippling, even 25 years later. This is a pain I once felt was, if not healed
completely, absolved through the nurturing care of another person I
believed was my soul mate. But that person too, for reasons of his own, decided
that I had weathered so many losses that one more didn’t make a difference; I was
already stained and blemished from the wounds of the past and having risen each
time I fell, of course I would rise again. Once, a few months ago, when I tried
to communicate the destruction wreaked, I was told, by this person, disinterestedly, that it gets better with time.
I have
wondered each day how it gets better with time. Does the ability to rise and go
forth as opposed to wither away in a dark room mean that it is better? Does the
impact of internalizing this pain and not expressing it mean that it is better?
Does laughing and making other people happy, therefore the self happy, mean
that it is better? Because happiness itself is so transient, and does not
exactly correlate to that other pain so well hidden.
I feel
sometimes that we are only given a certain amount of time with other people as
they become a mirror or window, depending on the lessons learnt. As I observe
one person grow into the cold, hurtful and distanced parent they never wanted
to be, I realize that I should take heed and learn not to do the same. I am
learning to detach myself from the emotions that have haunted me in the past,
those of others and the emotions that have caused me to act out irrationally. I
have ceased to abhor loss and struggle against aligning myself with pain.
Instead I have acceded in the realization that this too is part of my identity.
This is not necessarily better, but this is how I survive:
I rise each
day ready to go forth and conquer, not because the pains of yesteryear have
healed, but because I have come to accept them as part of who I am. I continue to fight with broken ribs and open
wounds because these wounds are the very things which have caused the
biological heart to ragingly pump blood to these wounds in the hope that the
delivery of oxygen and nutrients will one day heal them. Once healed, the heart
would cease to beat so ferociously.
