Remember when Taylor sang:
“Friends break up, friends get married
Strangers get born,
strangers get buried
Trends change, rumours fly through new skies
But I’m right where you left me”
And when Nikka Ursula said:
“We deserve a soft epilogue, my love”
You related a little too much to these lines.
You were still not sure what hurt: an unsaid goodbye or a prepared farewell? Maybe the difference did not matter in the end anyway.
The End.
You had always dreaded that. You had always been maybe too clingy and desperate with people, and when they came too close, the dread hit, and you got terrified, pushing them away before they could; a violent push and pull throughout, except they probably did not even see it and you would get infuriated that they did not. Or upset that perhaps they did but don’t care. At least that is what you had convinced yourself. Then the falling out would happen. The beginning of the end.
“You are just being melodramatic. People fall out all the time!” That was one more thing you never quite understood. How do people ever fall out? How could they go through so much together for so long yet break apart in no time? Of course, unless the difference between them gets drastic, but how do they not even at least remain friends sometimes?
“Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story”
– Richard Siken
If you uttered in front of them that you were probably born in the wrong generation, you’d be side-eyed by many. It does not even have to be romantic love. You feel too much in any bond. That used to be especially confusing when you came out of the closet. Dragged out of it frankly, wrecking friendship because of that, but that is a different story. If it were not you, then it would have been almost funny in some warped sort of way because who even faces these permutations of pain and thinks so much about people and wants them to stay?
Death probably pities and smiles at ones like you because death is what endings mean. But death itself longs for the life that follows it, the creation after destruction, so how can you just be the one stuck on endings? The love story of death and life is like parallel lines too; paths never meant to cross each other like star-crossed lovers but always waiting on the other side like Orpheus’s bride, still. Knowing the ending of that tale yet you read it, each time hoping Orpheus’s fear would be stilled and his fate would not be killed twice, like his tragic wife. Only if tragedies ended.
Of course, you can’t go back to the time before it ended, and maybe you don’t even want to, but at the same time, you do. What do you even crave? Is it the water cave where you were drenched with your friends and family during that one summer, whose memories come and go like those very waves? Perhaps it is Closure, the kinder cousin of Ending, that you seek. But unlike his solemn brother, he does not make his way to you on his own. You are the one who has to search for him, alone. He is elusive in nature because of our human nature to avoid endings, therefore avoiding him too, altogether. But he is often hidden in plain sight, a little distance behind his dear Ending.
“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
When the show is over, curtains are drawn, and bouquets are thrown. A flower that never belonged falls out. Like that flower you find yourself lingering quietly at the hearts of every character of that show, everyone you have ever loved, and look at the fallen petals around you, nostalgically beautiful to them but wistfully heartbreaking to you. A seed flies somewhere and finds itself on the soil of someone new. You look up to see them for the first time, only to close your eyes again and wonder when you’d bid them adieu too. Yet just hoping that this time you never do.
“Have you ever noticed you pick up little habits and phrases from the people you love? It’s no wonder our hearts are so easily broken when people leave. We become a reflection of the people that we care about and those personality traits stick with us even if the people don’t.”
“I make my ramen the way a friend taught me in eleventh grade. Every fall, I listen to a playlist made for me by a boy I drove across a border to hook up with. I eat sushi because a girl who won’t talk to me anymore made me try it, and Indian food because my best friend’s parents ordered for me before I knew what I liked. There are movies I love because someone I loved them first. I am a mosaic of everyone I’ve ever loved, even for a heartbeat.”
For more thought-provoking pieces, visit Her Campus at MUJ.
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