It has been roughly nine months since E passed.
The reason I count the time this way is, perhaps, because I have been all this time. His old nutcracker soldier stands guard over me at work, and the message on the whiteboard by his colleagues, which has been there since that awful week nine months ago, still says ‘We love you, E’.
And each time I pass by it, I wonder if he knew that we do. I wonder if we, his friends, ever made it so obvious to him that he would never have to wonder. I only knew him briefly compared to the rest of the company, and yet I was so affected by his passing. Perhaps it was because it was seemingly unjust, that a kind man like him left this world before we did. Perhaps it was the shock. I thought about it a lot that first month, and I don’t think there was any way he could have left this world that would have seemed in any way better.
Perhaps because it was most jarring and most recent witnessing of the frailty of our lives. It was a reminder of mine, as well as everyone else’s mortality. And I don’t know how I feel about it anymore.
I know people who have left this world since then. Each person has been a reminder; their lives a mosaic of the way we live. How insignificant, how small. How mired in our own mediocrity we are sometimes. How we take it all for granted, more often than not forgetting that we only have one shot at this. And yet, how great their presence, that their loss is felt in ways we remember and forget only at intervals, because being constantly reminded would be too painful.
Now that I have felt loss, I cannot imagine going through it again, or to allow it to fall on anyone else I know. But there is only so much I can do. I stare at the people I love around me, and cannot begin to conceive what I’d do without them. I know I will move on, as I have since, but how much it will hurt is something I don’t want to imagine.
I have gone through the routine; let go of some friendships and gained new ones; tried to make a few changes in my life, and yet. I find myself in a bit of a rut. It pains me to say this, but I feel as though I need to move. As though I need something new. I have driven myself ill with worry, and worried myself with paranoia about how I live. I have been worried about my health, imagining awful things and consulting various doctors who just smile bemusedly and assure me that I am fine, I have always been fine (“although you do need to move a little more”). I have felt stifled, and I have felt lonely, and I have been tired of feeling this way.
And I wonder, am always wondering, if this is just me, reverberating the pain of E’s loss – if I never let go of the string that was struck when we lost him, and if I’m still playing with it still. If his mortality has reminded me of mine, and if I’m too attached to this world to accept that.
(He’d find that line about a ‘reverberating string’, and my tiring state of mind, both amusing and exhausting, I imagine.)
There was a time I felt spiritually prepared to let go of this world. I was conveninently in Melbourne, away from almost all of my family, and I had taken to heart the temporary state of this world. I had absorbed the Islamic teaching that my fate has been set, and that I am to live this life to the best I can, in the best way I know how, and to own up to the fact that I will leave it one day, make my choices based on that.
It felt so simple then. I don’t have the same answers now. I feel that I have been so caught up in thinking and not doing, that I have grown restless in my own skin. I feel that I have placed this world in my heart, and not just my hands, and that this aching is reminiscent of it.
My mother says that she never had time to worry about such things when she was my age. She says that our anxieties and neuroses are symptoms of people who “think too much and only about frivolous concerns, because you’re wasting time doing the wrong things and fretting over it”. She had no time for a quarter-life crisis, much less consider the notion. “You,” she said, “should busy yourself with things you want to do. Better yourself. Pray that each day will be better than yesterday, and just DO it.”
She makes sense. So I’m going to pick up where I left off, before I was shaken by the everyday (that day so unlike every other day), and try that out for size.
(We miss you, E.)
