2011-05-15
aching heart
What will it be like when you are gone?
I remember first wondering about that when I was really young, too young to remember just how old I was. But the thought of it alone was enough to make me cry; I remember that. A little Lisa sniffled to herself as she began to draw out the consequences of the hypothetical. That's all I remember, is a couple tears.
I haven't thought about it much since. I haven't been too preoccupied with morality- my own or others' surrounding me- instead entirely fixated and immersed in the beauty, hardship, banality, and immediacy of vitality. Death is perhaps always looming, elusively skirting around somewhere in the curtains, but Life is on center stage, and the performance is too supremely captivating to ponder what's going on behind the scenes.
I know we are all growing older, as time passes. I see the latest pictures of my cousins, and they've sprouted up into giant versions of the dwarves I last visited years ago. I also see photographs of us, on family vacations only a few years ago, and all the faces look so fresh and youthful in comparison to the tired ones I see before me when I visit home. But even aging seems to evade my notice, once again too preoccupied with life, in particular and rather selfishly, entirely fixated upon my own. When I look in the mirror, I see a lineless face. The skin is firm and taught, my eyes and lips not yet framed by wrinkles, my past expressions leaving no trace of their continual appearances.
Your face, while in it are the preludes to my own, is different. But mostly only because of wrinkles and age spots, freckled by more suns than mine. Eyes, smiles, noses, we share.
There are thirty years between our faces. In the three decades between us, you've seen so much more labor and hardship than I have, much of it unwitnessed by me. But I have reaped the benefits of it, all the days of my life, your comfort and support in every way. We all like to think we are independent, autonomous beings. And we are, to some extent. But no amount of solo accomplishment and maturity will change the fact that I literally came from you. And you provided me with every resource that facilitated, nourished, and helped mould my existence and identity, ever since I first came into being and even to this day. When I first posed that question to myself, as well as when I ask it now, it's not just some musing on the nature of mortality. It is much more pointed than that.
What will it be like when YOU are gone?
Selfish as it may be, I can only frame it relative to myself. What will it me like, for me, when you are gone? My existence feels defined by your own. I am inextricably bound to you, more than anyone else on earth. I feel closer to you, viscerally, than anyone else in the whole world. Maybe I am romanticizing it, but it is no lie that you created and coddled this beating heart. And even though I've been set free from you, first when I left the womb and continually as I mature and begin to carve out an adulthood of my own, it still somehow feels that this heart will falter when your own stops beating. When the source and nourishment of my vitality has extinguished, how could my world go on? You are the origin of my life. But beyond that, you are the source of my most coveted possession, perhaps the only thing I've continually and most credibly owned: your love.
No matter what happens in the rest of my life, the relationships I forge and those I continue to develop and cultivate, no one will ever love me the way that you do. I have more faith in your love than I do of anything else in this world. In fact, it's not faith; it's the deepest, most palpable knowledge I hold. So many things in life are ambiguous and transient, or contingent upon certain factors or circumstances, both specific and capricious qualifications that equivocate their validity. Your love for me is the only thing I have that is free from these asterisks, the fine print and the exceptions. No matter who and how I am, you love me, greatly. I would never be so presumptuous to claim that I know how someone feels about me. I respect that emotions and opinions are fickle and often difficult to convey or accurately represent in a way that does them justice. But beyond that all, there's nothing than I know better, and feel more certain of, than your love for me, under any and all conditions.
If that was gone, what would there be to live for?
I like to think the relationship is reciprocal, but I know the way we love each other must be quite different, since our roles, one of us a caretaker and the other the nurtured, have been so divergent (and perhaps now, are beginning to reverse). You've been better at showing your love for me than I have for you, though, your displays less fettered by impatience, selfishness, and annoyance than mine have been. And for that, I feel great guilt, shame, and sadness. I know I haven't been bad to you, but I can't help but feel like I could never be good enough. Part of the issue is, how could I ever evoke to you the unfathomable love and gratitude I feel for you? Is it so overwhelming that I barely try, by shoehorning the expression into a pithy Mother's Day card or a modest bouquet on your birthday? Maybe our love for one another is too big, too incomprehensible, that our hearts would explode if we tried to actualize it.
And so I have to trust that you know it and feel it within yourself, the same way I do yours within me. That you know it more certainly and truly than anything else in this world, that it is with you every day and I don't have to say it or show it because it's surrounding us, it's filling us. But I will say it and show it, just like you do, and I'll try my best to do it more frequently, just as a reminder, even though, because you're you and it's me, you'll never forget.
What will it be like, when I'm around to have and feel all this love within me, but you no longer are?
Some day, I will know. And that day might come sooner than I ever would have imagined or expected, or thought reasonable or comprehensible. I'll never feel ready for that time. And I know when it happens, I will feel great sadness, which, just like our love, will be unparalleled by any other emotion. But I will have to remind myself that even though you might be gone, the love hasn't gone anywhere. It will still be within me and within you, as true and real as ever. And some day, I'll get to share some more of our love with someone else, someone I help create and nurture just like you did for me.
I can't control things that are beyond our scope, when death inevitably steps out from the curtain in the final scenes. I can't show you or tell you all that I feel for you, or how much I'll miss you when you're gone, or how worried I am that it'll be too soon, although any time would be too soon. But I can hope, and feel strongly within me, that you know how much I love you, and that you feel it in you always just like I feel your love for me.
leesah-likes at 12:45 a.m.