The Inheritance of Loss 3: The cycle ends (hopefully).

So I’ve lost my wallet, my cell phone and a few days after the cell phone I realised I lost a green notebook I set a lot of store by along with a white hair band  that I owned since my primary school days.  I can survive without the last two, as, of all the things I’ve currently been losing those two are the ones that are the least important. However, those two are  things I hold the closest to my heart.

That notebook had a rough draft of a poem, notes from the research I’d done on William Blake which was the groundwork for an article I wrote for the English Department journal; my first ever published article...... It also held ideas, jottings for new blog posts....

That white hair band must be the plainest accessory I’ve ever owned but it was a constant reminder of my school days, my friends, and my childhood. In some bizarre fashion it sort of linked my childhood in UAE to my teenhood in Mumbai.

As usual I have no memory of where I last saw them. Not a single clue. No one around me does either. Already bogged down by the stress of too many things missing I’ve given up on the last two, albeit after the ritualistic hunting process.  Nothing great has happened. Eventually I had to give up on them what with my final exams staring me in the face and my friends hammering it into my thick skull that I have bigger fish to fry.

So to quote the Indian media’s favourite cliché, "How do you feel now?" and in reply to that I don’t feel much, to be frank I don’t feel anything at all. After all the initial madness filled with anxiety attacks, eerie dreams, disturbed sleep and obsessive ranting about my lost objects I feel nothing. Zilch. Rien.

It’s simple really; the point of it all is I’ve learnt something out of it. You can’t hang on to things in life or people for that matter and being the hoarder that I am it’s an important lesson learned. No single person or thing in life are ever ‘the most important thing' of our lives because eventually, we learn to live without them. All the voids and hollow spaces they leave in and around us fill up. There might be the occasional bad day; times when you suddenly long for that thing from the past but then it goes away and you learn to cope with it. I can’t say I’m completely cured of my negligible strain of OCD but I’m on my way. 

Suddenly, things and routines I couldn’t do without; an absence of which would evoke fear, doubt and unreasonable apprehensions, that would keep niggling at the back of my mind stirring up a lot of negativity in the process, have stopped looming over me thus losing their larger than life appearance. The first step has been accepting the fact that ‘Alright, I do get more nervous than socially accepted and permitted levels of nervousness’.  Second step: realizing that a small event or string of events can affect the bigger picture of my life only if I want and make them too. Three: this is going to be a long, long process and requires a lot of belief and faith in myself. I shouldn't be expecting any overnight miracles and nor should anyone else.

So basically, losing 4 important items on 3 different occasions brought to the fore a problem I’ve been pushing aside as ‘just an annoying habit’. That’s looking at the bright side of the situation. Getting back to the realistic side of me I wish that this annoying disappearance of personal articles ends once and for all.

Hoping that, like Sonya says, "3 is the charm".

Falak