Tag: goodbyes

062b – grief is not generous

Everything feels a little different now. The news of Matthew Perry’s death is hitting hard. I read the news in the morning and went back to sleep, hoping I’d wake up to a different reality. 

I rarely feel this way about celebrity deaths (Matt Haig states the same sentiment in one of his very fresh posts). In fact he’s already expressed some of the things I’m feeling today / right now so maybe this is repetitive to anyone’s who’s reading this. But it doesn’t matter. 

I rarely feel this way about celebrity deaths but maybe Friends was different. Even when I’d made real, made-to-last friendship bonds, Friends was still precious. Our friendships deepened over long character and episode discussions and many, many rewatches of them. 

In school, I’d relate to Chandler a lot. 

This May, I saw the reunion movie (after a long break from the series) on a flight to Bangalore, which I was on to visit my college friends, after a sufficiently long gap. I told them when I met them how fitting it was that we (well, most of us anyway) were all obsessed with this show during college and now here I was watching the reunion movie almost a decade later since we first became friends.

It’s all a lot. 

I know a lot of people I know are feeling a lot. But I don’t know why that’s not making any of this easier. 

I suppose grief has a way of taking all your attention, all your resources. Grief is not generous, I’m realising. 

There’s also other contexts of the world (or our own personal lives, in many cases) that we cannot ignore. But we must grieve each story, each loss: whether we do it individually or separately is upto the feeler of said feelings.  

Or maybe “big specific deaths” also bring into focus the fragility of life. You get tense about the things you haven’t done, the stories you haven’t told, the people you haven’t spent enough time with, the grudges you haven’t let go of yet, the nice things you haven’t said to the people you want to appreciate, all of that. And yet, will you change? Will you take the courage to do even a little bit of everything you haven’t done? I’m going to do it. I’m going to write love-letters (or e-mails) to all the important people in my life today. Or at least, as many as I can. 

October seems like it’s becoming the season of goodbyes. 

Wake me up when October ends, I think? 

023a – say your goodbyes and wake up

She wakes up around noon on the day they have to leave. She promised them she’d wake up early in the morning but her sleep schedule’s messed up because of lapses in willpower the previous few nights. Her parents are going back after spending almost a month with her. They hadn’t seen each other for a year and having them around was more wonderful than she could have ever imagined. They’re leaving at a good time, she’s not tired of them yet but she’s quite satisfied with the amount of quality time she ended up getting with them.

She’s not good at goodbyes (who is?). Whether someone stays with her for a week or a month, she notices too many associations all around the house once they leave. Places they order food from, the spots they go to walks for. The television shows they watch together, the tiny arguments they have around daily habits. 

In some ways, she’s glad there’s less time for the “last day” stuff. Less of the “take care of yourself” and “when will you come visit us?” that might cause her to break down. She doesn’t like airport goodbyes either. She prefers to keep the limbo time short. She prefers the cuts to be cleaner.

She’s made social plans for later in the evening so she doesn’t have to feel her feelings when they’re fresh, she’s found that getting some space and time from emotions can help her process them better later on. She has a lot to do in the coming few weeks and it’s going to start making her anxious soon. She knows it’s probably better if she addresses this feeling sooner than later. She makes some to-do lists and is happy to notice that helps today.

Whenever she gets blocked on writing or reads something engaging, she ends up thinking about storytelling. There’s an episode in the new show she’s watching where someone talks about art working only if there’s truth in it. She’s gotten good at speaking the truth but she wonders how she could speak more engagingly, or more creatively. She’s gotten really good at giving everything a personal touch but she still struggles with believing that things deserve to be made simply because she wants to make them. She wants to add ornamentation and frills to the things she makes but she doesn’t always know how to do that. Should stories be told because someone wants to tell them or should they be told because someone wants to listen to them? Does the world have more bad listeners than good speakers?

She wants to meet more people, she wants to know more about them. She wants to meet interesting people so she can make characters off of them. 

She’s afraid of being content. When she’s content, she’s not driven to create. Creation is easiest when she’s seeking something. Ephemeral feelings of contentment and happiness are great, but she doesn’t know if she wants to be safe and warm in a blanket of satisfaction. She wants to be awake, not asleep.