I am feeling sick. Not just literally, because of the sweltering heat in Delhi, but also metaphorically sick of things. Sick of making myself vulnerable time and again when trying to meet people and date, and running into my old and new patterns, finding myself relating a bit too much to reels by insta-therapists and nodding along. I wrote a little poem to soothe one of my heartaches.
Everything is illuminated
in the absence of you.
The fog lifted the moment you left.
Lucid clarity,
speck-less vision,
I see it now.
I had come to romantise
the mist for so long.
Sometimes one (me) can get so caught up in the dream of who a person can be, the eyes goes off from who they actually showing me as they are, before I know their unavailability starts feeling like chemistry, and my emotions can start to lie to me.
And it goes downhill from there. If something really makes you question your intuition over and over you must know one thing, is that you must run.
The love type feeling can feel a lot like love, but its not even limerence, its not even a fantasy when all you know about the them is which poems they like the most ( which you happened to like the most too.) How romantic.
Some heartaches can last for years or a lifetime. The grief of losing a friend to death. Where the heart refuses to even out the creases no matter what. But there is as they say you grow around your grief.
There is Dr Tonkin Model of Grief.
While working as a counsellor in the 1990s, Dr Tonkin spoke to a woman whose child had died many years ago. The woman explained that at first, her grief filled up every part of her life. She drew a picture, like the one below, to explain this.
She had expected her grief to get smaller over time, as did Dr Tonkin. But that wasn’t what happened. Instead of her grief getting smaller, her life got larger, like in this second diagram.
As she experienced new things, created new parts of her life, she was able to grow around her grief.
I have carried my friend’s memories with me. I see her in my dreams every now and then. I wrote this a few days ago about her:
An archive of sentiments
all the grief, all the dreams,
lost hopes, ruminations,
endless laughter, missing friends,
so alive in my dreams.
I meet her every other night.
She is here still..
”You are not real” I told her.
She smiled and disappeared in front
of my eyes.
What was I thinking?
I wonder what she would think about this poem if she could read it. She was a fantastic poet! I would like to share some of her poems sometime.
Anyway, I hope your heart is doing fine.
I hope you are loving your friends deeply, and are loved right back. I hope you tell them how much they mean to you.
Until next time,