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I wish the pain we feel would have some kind of an ending. When we lose something, a long loved possession like your lost engagement ring. A golden band with black and white stones. We feel we have lost that bond that binds us in bondage with our relations. It is that ring that connects us with them, with so many people. And so we feel the pain of losing that tiny piece of accessory. That’s not bad. Of course, you sometimes forget you were ever clumsy enough to lose it, you replace it with other expensive possessions and expect that in time you will forget everything about it. Like a faded, battered and frayed photograph that has started to turn yellow, you expect the memory of it to fade away as well. I don’t believe that actually ever happens. No, that kind of pain never really goes away. It’s obviously a small disappointment but it ‘sticks’. It always ‘sticks’.

Or the kind of pain you feel when you lose a box full of your child’s play things of when he was a little kid. Things he or she might have raveled in. Doll houses, Mickey Mouse stuffed dolls, doctor sets with tiny stethoscopes and round mirrors. Maybe it gets thrown away while packing someday or maybe it slips your mind entirely and you end up giving it away willingly. You feel as if there and then you have lost a part of your child’s childhood. His adolescence. His innocence. You feel as if you have lost a part of him. Of course, you tell yourself they were only missing remnants of a bygone time. You tell yourself not to delve in the past. We take pride over what we have made in the present and what that kid will accomplish in the future. Or we simply tell ourselves they were after all just a child’s play things. We tell our minds not to be so fickle, not to be so ‘childish’ as to brood over something that does not even exist anymore. But do we really ever forget that those toys were ever in our possession? Does the pain of never being able to see them again ever go away? Of course you have the photographs to reminisce by but doesn’t your heart suffer at the thought of never being able to touch the smooth cotton fibers of the little skirts of the dolls.

Of course, there are other kinds of pains too. The kind that are a little harder to forget. The kind where even when you cut off all ties with all sorts of feeling , there’s still a scab that festers there and forms a scar. No, there are certain types of pains that never really leave us. Sometimes, they are things we think of when we wake up first thing in the morning and the last thing when we go to sleep at night. Perhaps when we permanently lose a dearly beloved. Your mum who you used to constantly berate with or your dad who taught you everything from horses to hiking to camping in the mountains. Or when you become estranged from your sister because she does not really ‘get’ you and maybe she does not want to know you anymore because knowing you invites a lot of trouble. You complicate things and she just can’t take it anymore with your sloppy heart throb stories. 

Sometimes, the relationships that cause us the most amount of pain and hurt are the ones we don’t want to lose yet. The ones that we are made to forget and we are just not ready to let go yet. But we forget them under compulsion or under some strange code of conduct or under some covert oath that we took long ago under the burden of our own principles. The realization that we have a duty towards someone else happiness and satisfaction and that we cannot just live for our own selves strikes us and we are made to forget these relationships. We are made to forget these people. These people might be one of their kind in our lives but we do it anyways. David Hume said, ‘reason is slave to the passion’. If that were ever true, he would have been a very happy man. I doubt he was. No, we use our reason, we chalk out our own logical endings for different scenarios and pick the most viable ones. Yes, it is reason that takes us away from our passions, our free will and makes us suffer undeniably and perpetually.

We never really forget that first kiss, the first time somebody laid a hand over your shoulder, first time somebody pulled you to the side and hugged you tight, that first loving look your first ever crush gives you. Something that you would want to control but the lines of your face give way.

We may develop feelings for many things in life, many people. Or maybe become attached to only a few people. That doesn’t matter. What matters is knowing that sometimes having feelings for things does not matter at all. Because most of the times we have to do what is right. What is appropriate. What is best for us. These feelings than become a tiny speck of dot under the pervasive lines of life.