Letting Go

I am a big fan of hanging on to the past. I cling to it like there is no tomorrow, like this is all I have to keep me going through today. I cherish memories, I cry when I see and touch old gifts and memorabilia, and I collect everything I can so I can look at them later. I am always trying to save everything up and store it so that things can remind me what my brain alone cannot.

And that’s why, letting go is not a concept I am familiar with. I don’t understand how people deal with moving places. I have moved from Duliajan to Mumbai to Muscat to Bangalore to Pune, and every time I have left pieces of me behind. You would think all that moving would have made me comfortable with moving but I still get antsy about moving.

Places cannot be carried wherever you go but I usually consider relationships to be location-agnostic. They can be carried through time and space, with some effort. However, I have learnt over and over again that it is not easy to sustain a relationship. I have learnt this afresh with every relationship that has eventually ended and right now, I am learning it anew.

I recently lost a cherished relationship. It meant a lot to me. It came with its ups and downs, and there were many points when the downs were more, but it still meant a lot to me. As of today, this relationship has fallen to pieces, with absolutely nothing to bring it back up. It’s a painful process and I am trying to understand the lesson of letting go.

I can’t let go. I find this relationship in gifts around my house, I find it in emails in my inbox, I find it in places on the street. There is no dearth of sources that immediately transport me to happier times. It is a difficult task to look at them fondly without wanting them again.

With every instance of letting go, I shed a part of me and put a new piece in. It creates a newer version of me. This newer version isn’t necessarily better or worse – it’s just different. I find it hard to adjust to this new version. It’s like when the year changes and you have to get used to writing the year wrong. The first few weeks, you write the incorrect week and scratch the last number out to correct it. Except in this adjustment, it takes well over weeks to deal with it – sometimes even months. It’s not pleasant.

So, this is just a brief writing to tie up the move into the newer Basu. It’s been many months of adjustment and I figured just writing something about it would feel like closure – a real new beginning.