Loss

One of my all time favorite poems is One Art by Elizabeth Bishop. Every time I read it, the words just pull me in a little bit more. How could they not?

"The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.


Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master."

I think about these lines a lot, especially in the past year or so. A lot has been lost and most of it never really belonged to me. When I am feeling particularly self-indulgent, I tell myself, what have I not lost? I have lost a parent who I never really felt I had. Now in my early thirties I feel that I have lost my youthfulness, whatever that ephemeral term meant. I have also lost my metabolism and that is a pretty concrete concept. 

Last year I lost this hot pink adidas jacket that was indestructible. I owned it since I was 22 and it had become a little tight but it had traveled all the way from noida-land with me to grad school to Chicago. I lost it in Orlando, somewhere between adventure island and the shuttle to our hotel (3-star for the average user but absolutely perfect for us). A recent scare made me realize I could lose my mother too. I am not sure how I would survive that.

I have lost so many pieces of beloved jewelry that when I think about them, it stings my heart. A lovely, carved ring, fell into a giant bin at office and want as I may, I could not dive after the ring. I lost a recent sort-of pearl earring, just the one. I lost another half of a set, a tiny gold-colored teardrop my only childhood friend got for me from Dubai. 

I have lost my dignity and then found it and then lost it again and I feel that this will be an ongoing loss. No one wins in this one. 

There are days and weeks like this where I am viscerally conscious of all that I have lost. It is like all of those things, people, memories, they went into this black hole and we are now in some sort of reverse motion movie. Everything is flying back out and setting itself upright and the landscape is vast. The Zara pants that I left in Vietnam (that fit me well and did not slide down my butt), the book I left in the flight on my first trip to the US, groggy on heavy antibiotics, fevered and too tired to even turn back or wait till everyone deplaned. The glasses that fell of my face as I was sleeping on an early morning flight and the memory of teaching (TAing) a class barely able to see most students. 

I can't help it when all of these losses decide to resurrect themselves and huddle together. So I cry. Mostly I cry thinking about my father and my sadness and guilt and the knowledge there is no going back, although I wildly fantasize about going back and finding his ashes from the river and putting them together and giving him a hug. A final hug. But I won't be able to ever and that is the irrevocable nature of some losses. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.