A Monsoon of Quiet Loss

A ramshackle heart. 

A balcony. 

And monsoon.

Rain that brings with it memories of joy and love, now long gone. A breeze that carries the notes of freewheeling days, splashy puddles, raindrop-fresh giggles, and crystal clear convictions. 

A day that reminds me of Before. 

Before the anticlimax, Before the petering out, Before the endless vacuum.

Most things in life don't come to an end with a flash and bang, with drama and effective stage exits. They just...fade. Not with a bang, but a whimper - isn't that how the world ends?

Fleeting, fleeting love. 

Oh-so-deceptive as it first makes its way into your heart and your life. 

Whispering of ever-afters and rock-solid permanence. 

Singing of beloved tales and classic films that seem to bear testimony to the sheer dependability of love. Lulling you into believing in the magic. 

Love.

It makes the world go round, it's all you need, you can't buy it, it'll see you through the time of cholera, it is a story in itself, it's hard on the knees, it bites and bleeds and lives and dies and begs and pleads.

So when it finally happens, when it's-there-one-minute-and-gone-the-next, you feel like you've been punched in the gut and had the wind knocked out of you. It's not like it went kicking and screaming, on the heels of terrible betrayal or irreconcilable differences or one of those equally loaded phrases. 

It left quietly, one morning, while you were making toast for breakfast. 

So, you try desperately to retrieve it, rescue it, bring it back - at any cost.

But it's gone. For good. 

The devastation is heart-stopping, because it's the aftermath of a storm so silent and insidious that you never even realized it was there. It's left rubble in its wake, a debris of pointlessness and dreams no longer dreamed, of songs that just sound like empty words, of broken promises, of dangling conversations that are punctuated with sentences that mean nothing. 

It is a wreckage that reeks of absence, of failure - not of high-strung emotions like anger and grief and guilt. 

A quiet collapse. 

Love: a house of cards that the slightest random bit of breeze can topple with a soft swoosh.

Thus, the balcony.

And the ramshackle heart.

And a monsoon of loss.

Lost and Found

Image: Henry Weddiasmara

“Everyone belongs somewhere.”
“Maybe not everyone…. Maybe some people just get lost.”

There is a certain amount of charm in being that lost person. It’s undeniable. The whirlwind of cynical freewheeling, the moments of crisis on windy terraces, the bitterness of vodka as a Friday night savior, the complete disdain for long-term consequences, the vaguely haunting gestures of trying to get your bearings, the gloss of dismissive statements, the satisfaction of cutting sarcasm, and the haggard, yet real, smiles exchanged across a room, across a lifetime, across a dimension that is typically impassable…

There is also a sense of vacuous loss when you transition from being lost to being found, being fine, being happy…. Not nostalgia exactly. That would be to romanticize a time that cannot – should not – be romanticized. But even once the rose-tinted glasses have been relegated to the heap of dusty memories … there remains a slippery sense of having lost something in the present joy.

Lost…what? Is it the general madness? Or is it the rollercoaster extremes that lost people seem to thrive on…? And even there, to clarify, it’s hard to miss the highs, because those exist even when one is happy – almost exactly the same ones. So, impossible as it may sound, maybe it is the rock-bottom despair that is missed…? Of course, it makes no sense. Except in the most roundabout of ways…where it becomes clear that what binds us all together as a race is a complex whole of pain and happiness. And all of a sudden, it feels like only half the connection is being made. Isolated from the pain, and privy only to the content pleasures…

Humanity kicks in at this point, and it becomes easier to identify with the young boy at the signal, the tired-looking receptionist, the gas-tragedy agitators, the aging patriarch, the anguished colleague, and the numb friend. It is almost as if the capacity for pain needs to be reinvented...through improvised methods…in case one becomes totally alone in that solitary bubble of joy.

So the tears well up, almost inexplicably… at advertisements that you know are manipulating all the right strings… at songs that you would have classified as sentimental nonsense in another lifetime… at distant situations – the kind where it was easier to be a harsh realist when you had your own situations to deal with… at the third drink when you know perfectly well that you’ll stay stark sober for another two at least – but the mind plays tricks on you, bewilders you, leads you down that maze of sorrow you have inhabited once upon a time… Fighting your enemy is easier when he or she exists outside of you, isn’t it?

Have I got it right? Or is it just easier to complicate something and turn it into a shimmering smoky fable than to accept that, maybe, we’re just a dissatisfied race without the capacity to be truly happy…? Maybe the grass always is greener on the other side…? But, no… I cannot believe that… Reveling in joy, but having melancholy tug at you once in a while confirms the best of anyone’s humanity, does it not? In an essentially solitary existence, imagination is our only source of compassion… And how can we (and why should we) deny the best part of ourselves?