Of Missings And Musings

Yesterday, I had a wonderful day out with three of the best women I know. A lot of inane conversations, meeting after a long vacation apart, getting my car towed away (and having it back within 30 minutes, no less). It was a sorely needed break.

When I returned home, I felt something missing. Checking my hands and arms to make sure none of my precious bracelets or rings had fallen off, I realized it wasn’t a physical missing. It was almost like a badly applied emotional plaster. There was an intrusive quality to this feeling. Something unknown. Like an irritant, it left me feeling uncomfortable for an astonishingly long time. Now, I’m not really a person who dwells too long on what is bothersome. I find that the discomfort ends when I can name the source, and I can usually do it fairly fast. This time, it was different. I went to bed early, and tossed around for a couple of hours. Nothing seemed to make sense. I was utterly confused as to what was annoying me. I don’t like being confused. It makes me feel stupid, and since not a lot of things can do that, I find it borderline painful.

Suddenly, I realized exactly what was wrong. It was so simple, yet so surprising, that I woke up my sister to tell her what it was. I have been, or correctly, had been missing a person I knew a while ago. I had been missing the said person, let’s call him M, almost constantly. It wasn’t the way you miss someone you love, with cheesy memories and sudden smiles at half-remembered inside jokes. There was no fondness attached to this missing. It was almost an involuntary part of me. I was never particularly close to M. We knew the same people, and went out with the same group, but we didn’t have any special personal equation. And yet, I missed him. I picked up my phone innumerable times, thinking I should call him. I thought of him almost constantly, and there was a silly phase when I was convinced I was in love when a man I barely knew.

Why this sudden shift towards discussing M, you say? Well, the uncomfortable feeling was related to him. Suddenly, I didn’t miss him. That aching void that I filled with questions I wanted to ask him, and the reasons I wanted, suddenly disappeared. It found itself replaced by the more important questions of how and when was I going to pay for my next conference.

I tried to put the two seemingly unrelated things together. Why would not missing someone annoy me so much? Shouldn’t I have felt relief that this constant ache that had me questioning my sanity at times had dissipated? I knew the feeling was irrational, so wasn’t the lack of it a good thing? Then, it struck me. I didn’t stop missing M. I started missing the feeling of missing someone. In the long time that I did feel this particular emotion, it had morphed from missing a particular person into a strange feeling of enjoying this deprivation. I was addicted to the process of missing someone. It gave me something to ruminate over, something to obsess over. It wasted time, and filled my thoughts. In all, it was rather perfect for someone like me. The intensity and the melodrama attached to missing someone had drawn me in, and I was trapped, clinging on to the barest of threads to feel that longing.

Addiction, as a rule, is a fairly negative word. It has unhealthy connotations, and I used to rebel against them. ‘Addictions can be healthy too, and they are fuel’. That was my argument. However, over time, I’ve come to discern between passion and addiction. Passion is what you nurture. You bleed dry, willingly, to fulfill your passions. Addictions, on the other hand, bleed you dry. They draw too much out of you, and you’re too enamored to realize just when you’ve given up too much. The feeling, this indescribable need to want something, was an addiction. It hampered my ability to actually enjoy what I was doing in the moment. Living in an imaginary wonderland only takes you so far. Then it’s unchartered territory, with pitfalls that translate into ones in the real world.

Addictions define a person, for in an addiction you can see a person. My vice is wanting to love. It’s not as much as being loved, as it is showing people that I care. It manifests itself in strange ways, and this one of the strangest. It was definitely an interesting experience, this whole rigmarole. It seems rather gimmicky as I type it out, but I know what I felt was real. What changed in a span of 24 hours is the fact that some small part of me has realized I have people I can truly care about now. I can express this need to love. I can display affection, and have it, for a large part, returned wholeheartedly. It’s a healing experience. Bit by bit, the intrusiveness of this sudden emotional patch-up is blooming into a sense of satisfaction. Maybe I am, slowly, putting the puzzle pieces back in the box. Building the puzzle back again is another struggle, but the foundations, stronger and sturdier ones, are building themselves.

Stay awkward

Keep learning

Harnidh xx

Proofreading (and allowing me to rant like a crazy fool) credits: Shree