Missing

I believe some crucial parts of myself has fallen away over the past six months. I sometimes feel myself looking at them as one looks through the interstices of a curtain into the light. - An unreflectingly dim solid bar just beyond. These little fragments were crucial to me when I was twenty, but now that I've only got a month left of it, they don't appear to be as important anymore. I treasured things which I was accustomed to, and had forgotten how difficult, yet equally comforting, the things to which I was unaccustomed to were. I started university a little later compared to others, I perhaps am more of a curioso than one who soundlessly blends into cacophonous peace. My summer has been different; uneventful; languid. I never did well with the silent vacuum of stagnation, of unremitting self-disapprobation; because they before meant nothing to me. I was like another person in my younger years: more self-assured, more delusional. Now I increasingly appear to perceive my shortcomings, to sympathize with myself for experiencing those phases of being lost and helpless. I still hold myself to nigh impossible standards, but I also allow myself to crumble from time to time.

The importance of things depend on its alternations across the crest or trough of time. What you cherish may already have, unbeknownst to you, dissipated the moment it has come to be. It's funny how certain priorities in life never change or may rather suddenly turn upon their head; as Eliot wrote: 'The awful daring of a moment's surrender / 'Which an age of prudence can never retract.' By this 'moment's surrender' of self-apathy have I almost forgotten how to write for myself. I miss that. I wonder how often do we too lose parts of ourselves along the way which were once incommensurable. Are we any the better or the worse for those losses? Or are they simply natural like a snake forfeiting its skin?

Rarely do people wish to change out of choice; it is often compelled by circumstance. My situation either enables or disavows my self-reflection. I have been mooring elsewhere all the while to only end up in discontentment; unencouraged: and the longer I abandoned the whispers the longer I felt unworthy to write them out and see them in the light. I may have probably come to the extremities of my patience. I probably am throwing stones to futilely measure the darkness' depths. Be it of an empty desperation, we can't simply give up on ourselves on account of the parts already lost. They might never be recovered but the form in which they return might just be what we've been unconsciously hoping for.

I think people are meant to miss parts of who they were. Without remembering what they have forgone, they can't perceive the value of what has grown instead. It's not a replacement by any means: it's like a transfiguration. I can try to retrieve the lost timeworn pieces, but they won't have the same luster again. The relationship we have with ourselves changes every instant - so does the pieces' relevance. They probably become detached, bittersweet memories to us by then. I think that we try to seek strength in numbers against this fallibility. Try to surround ourselves with as many experiences as possible in order to veil our fragmented minds. I often fear the power of this vague sense of incompletion that inundates me. But these missing pieces heighten our sense of self more than anything else. By virtue of their past existences and subsequent loss, the emptiness that's left behind traces the outlines of something new; born of the former's wounds. Those apparently missing parts make us whole again. Make us wake up to another day again.

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Flowers from my garden! :P