The years is ending, I am getting older and it is horrifying. Now that that is out of the way, hello and how have you been? Eating well I hope, don’t starve yourself too much for your figure , or worse , for longevity , you’re not getting out of this life alive anyway, and there’s no KFC in Hell , might as well right ? Plus, it’s headed towards the New Year, nothing astronomically different about that. Except of course, that when the earth does that last stretch around the sun, every experience of the past year becomes magnified, it’s sort of like when your life flashes before your eyes before death but not as intense because since it’s just a year , you only die a little bit.
The most harrowing aspect of the tiny little deaths of self is that it’s not just slivers of your soul that are washed away by time. Every year, you meet new people and every year you lose even more people than you meet. I have yet to meet anyone (not even my oh so jaded much older mentors) who has gotten used to having wash away from their reality. It’s an ironic pain this one, more often than not the people who you feel you have lost are in so close to you they’d probably smell it if you had a plate of bad eggs and your stomach went on strike. Despite being so close however, it’s as if they are in a different reality altogether. Where you used to look forward to hours upon hours, you barely nod when you pass each other. It’s as if any good memories, good feelings and shared experiences happened in a parallel reality that you just couldn’t go back to, want to though you might. This is the pain of love lost.
This particular sun cycle, I’ve met scores of beautiful people. Some of them it felt immediately like our souls just clicked. Like I was an empty éclair and then someone took a syringe and pumped some of that sticky chocolatey stuff (Nougat?) into me and I was whole again. Some it was a slow burn, as if you put a teabag in water just the right temperature and wait for that alchemy to happen. Yet for every single wonderful human I met I lost ten. They are not dead, nothing as dramatic as that, I still exchange pleasantries regularly with most of them even, but something was there and it just isn’t anymore. It’s a familiar feeling for most people, otherwise we wouldn’t have so many social media accounts littered with” Cut people off!” posts.
I came to a rather sobering realization after some cycles of love lost, that no one owes me connection and that I am entitled to nothing in that regards. It scared the living daylights out of me realizing that even my connection to my parents, the humans I feel most entitled to is a luxury. All the friends who would go out of their way to inconvenience themselves for me are a luxury. The most direct effect of this realization is that I became significantly more liberal with my “I Love you’s.” When people do not need to care about you and still go out of their way to do so, the optics of expressing your love become quite trivial.
The existence (or lack thereof) of entitlement however, goes both ways. Just as I realized that I am entitled to nobody on this planet, I realized that the reverse is also true nobody is entitled to me. You can imagine the ease with which I have been removing myself from the lives of people who bring me grief (or honestly even just mildly irk me). In the end I couldn’t escape the fate of being as callous as the ‘cut off mafia’ I despise so much. Maybe next year will have figured this shit out, until then It feels like an Adele song (seriously, it is uncanny how Adele manages to capture this feeling in every single song! )
Manenoz 