Navigating absence and loss
As much as I tried to digest that alone no longer equals lonely and that loneliness and solitude are two distinct things that don’t overlap, the thin line between those two is still unseen to me. What is lonely after all? Was it a feeling of having no one to talk and share with? or Was it all a sense of craving for companionship?
I was entrapped in the idea of being solitude, or as they sometimes called it, “freedom,” but the urge to share every little detail of what was happening was simply too great to bear. I yearned for a space where I could expose my most vulnerable self. Being a giver for practically all of my life without receiving the right reciprocation has made me the loneliest person I’ve ever been, and I apologize to “her” repeatedly after a people-pleasing session has started.
Ever since I was a kid, born as the eldest has altered me to be the silent one. The emptiness swelled and started to overwhelm me as I aged. Your thoughts are left dangling in a long trap session with no one to validate them. No one warns about how lonely adulthood feels. Life after graduate and entering the professional era has buried my loneliness phase to its bottom. Leaving the closest one, reconnecting with many people for the sake of professionalism has beaten up my introverted ass. It’s getting harder when I recognize myself never placed in a relationship. The ‘why’ and the ‘when’ wrapping my head.
Well, it’s giving me a ‘why don’t you try’ when it comes to romantic one. Meeting, connecting, and sharing the same excitement with ones I thought would stay, yet the excitement faded away sooner than I expected. Or perhaps it was me, who lacked the point they expected. After work dinner, a cup of flat white on Saturday evening, the ‘how’s work today’ question, that black sweater he borrowed me during the windy night and the sillage of his perfume are all signs of his presence. The searching, The ‘Think I found the one’, and The ‘lesson learned’ era followed after. Repeatedly, evoking a deep, inexplicable melancholy, and a sense of being lost.
Unlike the other story of everyone’s life movie, mine was a straight flat running line, where everything just stayed in place. It was a spike for a little period before returning to the monotonous, linear routine. Glued by my surroundings’ stories, I once came to the conclusion that my existence was so unproblematic that it made me wonder when God would send me the trouble. Will it be a big deal? What should I do to prepare it?
I attempted to consider myself as a partially qualified adult since everyone my age has dealt with and overcome far greater difficulties throughout their lives, and some have had it even worse. It took hours of deliberation to realize that I had been battling with a comparable issue in my own life. Growing up with both parents working required me to deal with their absence, both physically and mentally. The communication gap that I had no idea would become a big loss of me and my emotional communication skills one day.
Bottling up feelings has been my top-tier skill I’ve had. Oftentimes, my thoughts are clouded by rage. Hours and hours were spent just to unfold the answer to the loss and leaving. It wasn’t hard to realize I had a large, gaping hole in me, and deciding what to fill it with, is another long-way process. Or maybe I was merely searching for closure and an apology from them, not realizing they were already done it without expressing their apologies through words.
Perhaps, i found apology through the meals my mom served right before i went to work each morning, every cup of coffee she made for us, through the unanswered message I sent to ones I wished were answered, through unchecked lists we built or through the giggles we’ve shared while watching some randoms video you sent me.
Later, life might be easy if i don't weight particular mistake we’ve made in the past. What is gone is gone. Feel lightly, think lightly, go forward.
(93:4) Indeed what is to come will be better for you than what has gone by.4
