Melancholic musings

*msn: Stress is a word used to describe people who only started studying a week ago. To describe me, you need many many more.

I liked the way you looked

at me;

Like you knew me,

inside-out,

without asking, or trying, or wanting to.

You left; I looked for you,

in strange faces,

and gazes,

because I was lonely;

without someone to look at me like you do.

And then today I knew:

I look for you less now,

(I’m sad,

are you?

I’ll say it again to make it more true)

I look for you less now.

You know the saying about how time heals all wounds?

I hate it. I hate the idea that you miss people less over time, that you don’t care so much that they’re gone, that you get used to an empty space which grows smaller everyday anyway.

If someone meant so much to me that losing them hurt so much, then when the hurt starts to go away, it’s like I’ve lost something; that, meaning, that they were once to me.

Perhaps when people say that time heals all wounds, they really mean that in time we learn to live with them, unhealed.

I lost my (paternal) grandfather before I was born, and my grandmother when I was very young, and I hardly remember her. Some years after I lost my other grandmother, and though this one hurt more, it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would.

And in my naivety (for there is no other word) I believed that yes, indeed, in time hurt went away.

And then one day I asked my mother about her mother and what really happened to her, because I never really knew – I had been too young to ask, or be told.

And though she spoke with a smile on her face (it was painless, and she got to say goodbye), there was an aching in her voice and unshed tears in her eyes which she didn’t try to hide.

Then the next year we went to pray at my father’s parents’ grave, and as we placed the joss sticks in the holder, I turned to him and asked, “Do you miss them, dad?” and in an instant, without time for thought or reflection, without pausing even to turn his head towards me, he said,

“Every day.”

And though this time there was no tremble, no teary eyes (like me, my father does not cry), the pain was there, in the quick and simple answer, in the graveness of his tone.

That, I think, is what missing someone is really like. The pain doesn’t go away. It may stop screaming in your head, stop feeling like shattered glass in your throat, but the ache is always there, and an undying longing that, in the end, hurts just the same, or even more.

So be nice to the people you know you’ll miss, because grief is an arduous journey on its own, without having to bear the unbearable – regret – too.

No, nothing happened. Just in a musing, melancholic state of mind.