Edited by: Shloka Sankar
Sometimes I wonder if I have died a lesser death. Not because I am gone, but because you do not remember me. But maybe it is better to be forgotten, than half-remembered. For I will stand there, for all intents and purposes like a relative who is rambling about having seen you as a baby, and it will slowly dawn upon you that the person in your head was a frozen fragment of the past, and the person in front of you is not the same. What will you do then? It is a strange grief to mourn the passing of time, not for what is gone, but for what is not the same. And I am not the only one who is different.
You’ve changed. You walk differently, like you don’t care what people think anymore. Your voice is different – the hint of an accent curls around the edges of your words. Words slip into your sentences like mementos from distant strangers and you grew out your hair. When did you start painting your nails and being happy? How dare you let go of the things that have burdened you all your life? Because we told each other stories about our scars in the middle of the night, and now I cannot see yours. I know you only in silhouette, shadowed by your pain, and this light is blinding. And what a terrible blindness it is – to fear what was familiar. Is it cruel of me to want to stop you from becoming a better version of yourself, only because that person is a stranger, and I will miss you? Allow me this bitterness; we both grew up, but you have grown distant.
I do not fear change. But I fear the changes I will miss. I try to keep up – to keep watch. Like an old guard in an abandoned watchtower, staring at the horizon and smoking their pipe. Still, there are changes you will not mention. The ones I will not see, that I will not hear about. They will creep by me like rust corroding steel, every tiny thing too insignificant to mention slowly summing up to become things that are far too significant to mention. For you do not notice that you are different, and all I can see are the differences. It is not a simple thing that can be brought up in conversation, it is entirely greater than that – some innate shift in the very essence of Who You Are, that can be surmised with awkward pauses, and the lingering feeling of dread, but never truly known. Here in the heart of what I knew best, unfamiliarity has grown like a vicious rot and I cannot burn it away because I do not know what will remain. So I stand here staring while terror rakes its claws upon the part of me that I left with you, and I do nothing because I refuse to remember you only as ashes on the wind. It is foolish, I know. I have already spent the majority of the time I will ever spend with you. The last five times we met were the days of a single week. The next five will be the disparate days of a decade. The memory of you will live with me far longer than this new version of you, that will again be different.
But memories are like a painting. I brought you to life in my mind with the colours that I had with me, with shaky hands that smudged the edges and blunt pencils that dulled the knowing sparkle in your smile. What colour did I use to paint the sorrow in your eyes? Was it the right one? Could I even understand then, what pain you felt? Enough to render it in my mind with the absolute certainty with which you bared it to the world? The perception of youth is often flawed. You are not the only one who is different.
What would I think, if I were to meet that version of you today? It would still not be you. I have new things to paint you with, and no two paintings are the same. And that is the fact of it – is it not? You are trapped in memory, like a fly in amber, bound in caricature by the perception of the dead and separated from the present by the insurmountable vastness of distance and time.
Still, there is a knowing sparkle in your smile. And I miss you.
Maybe I should reach out to you. Perhaps I will stand there, for all intents and purposes like a relative who is rambling about having seen you as a baby, and it will slowly dawn upon you that the person in your head was a frozen fragment of the past, and the person in front of you is not the same.
Then we will talk. And I will paint.