On Byes

I remember watching this movie, Call Me By Your Name. A father is speaking to his son about his heartbreak. He spoke something about keeping your heart open and feeling everything, because by the time most people reach their 30s, they become emotionally bankrupt. I don’t know much about emotional bankruptcy, except that when someone’s there, I wonder if one can ever be blamed for it.

How do you survive this life and never feel that sense of almost emotional bankruptcy? Maybe a point where there is nothing left to give? Maybe hearts don't run out as much as they must go in debt – often of self-love itself. You must, at some point, learn how to fill it all up through stories, or substances, or nature.

Perhaps when hearts go in debt, the mind starts making the deposits it deems fit – and often it is dangerous territory when those boundaries are crossed.

I’m writing this from Bangalore airport, just about to board another flight out of the city.

Airports, train stations, bus stations, and all places of transit have now become such a sacred space for me. Almost spiritual, because I am forced to get out of the regular programming of my mind and enter this in-between state where I see people arrive and depart.

Here is how I think my heart looks sometimes. Captured at a cafe in Prague.

To be an adult is to know that you will end up experiencing the departure of people – hundreds of them – by the time you are in your 30s. Whether you remember it or not. People are always leaving, moving, in transit. One of the key things is to learn how to say goodbye and deal with the space that is left in someone’s absence.

I’m 33, and by this time, I have said goodbye to so many people I would have rather not.

These goodbyes become especially real when I find myself in transit zones.

In this moment, I am thinking of so many whose absence I have had to learn to deal with, even after all these years. I remember a time when I felt at home with my friends D and N. They left six years ago now, and I’m here. They just moved continents, but I feel their absence. My friend P left Gurgaon and moved to America. This is the first time in four years that I am going to Gurgaon and she is not around. I hate that I won’t see her.

But there is also the absence of those who have left and I cannot say goodbye to. So many who have left their physical bodies and I couldn’t do anything about it. I never got a chance to tell them how much they meant to me. Their voices, which I heard years or even decades ago, are never to be heard again.

Learning to be an adult, outside of all the chores and earning money, is also knowing and experiencing the absence of those I have loved with so much intensity, knowing there isn’t much I can do about it. I just have to learn how to live without them, or with their absence. I am often surprised that the heart has enough left to live after all of this.

I often go back to this line: Your absence has gone through me like a thread through a needle, everything I do now is stitched with its color. – W.S. Merwin

It feels like a part of my heart is forever earmarked for them to someday return, knowing very well that my physical body will probably never experience their presence again.

I don’t know if one can get used to the absence of people. I don’t know whether the human mind and body were ever designed to experience the departure of so many people. How do I explain to my tribal brain, which was probably designed to know only a handful of people I would have spent my life with, that this is all real?

No matter what I say or do, no matter how much I try to fill up this space, the tragedy is that the space is forever left empty. And there is nothing I can do about it. And maybe It is such a privilege that I can’t. To know there was a person who occupied space is to know that for a small amount of time, I experienced what I did and that it was real.

I often wonder what the universe must need or expect me to do with this space.

I am learning that the universe probably just wants me to remember this space because of the people who occupied it, and to nurse it with a lot of love.

I am thinking of all those I wish were closer – physically – all those I wish I got one more chance to speak with. I know there was a time when I got to experience life with them without any agenda. Playing cricket with them as a child, doing debates, losing against them in sports, hanging out with them and their families. I experienced so much of life with them that my cup, whatever size it may have been then, was overflowing and perhaps even grew bigger.

It wasn’t my choice to come into this life, and it won’t be my choice when my time comes. But in all the life I am yet to experience, there is a permanent space for those I have loved and forever will love in the timeline of my own life and experience. These deposits will never be withdrawn, so hope, my heart will never have to file for bankruptcy. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Love,

Rishi