Remembrance
“Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.”
– W.S. Merwin
It has been a year now and you have been my one and only constant thought each and every day. Your absence has felt more like an echo than a silence. My heart hasn’t been as resilient as I expected it to be. Time seems to have moved fast and I couldn’t prevent myself from starting to see it as an adversary I am constantly fighting against. I fear the passing of time. I fear this year too will come to an end. I fear the passing of time will lessen my claim that the time when you were alive was recent. I fear it will be soon in the distant past. I am afraid I’ll soon start forgetting pieces of you. I am afraid I’ll soon stop thinking of you as much. And all this feels like I am letting you die again. The end of each day feels it’s stabbing me with the reminder that time will not slow down. I feel soon I will miss you more than I remember you. It will be more piecing the past together and less retracing it back. I fear the thought of slowly forgetting all the small and big details I have held so close and tightly guarded. What will I be left with then?
Is it too late to look at the photographs and videos? Should I be telling stories about you to others or let others tell me what they remember of you. Or should all of it must always be kept inside? Is it already too late to write things down? Is what I remember still worth putting into words? What if I write and miss out on things? What if I write and then read it back and see the feelings around it diminishing due to limitations of words and language? What if I write and it ruins it?