Loss

Reflections of self

Feels like a combination of emptiness and physical pain, when you lose someone. Death is easier to deal with, because of its finality, than the loss of someone you admire, look-up to, see as a role model, whom you discover, one day, to be not the person you believed they were.

That person did nothing but be who they are --the glorification and consequent respect came from you, uncalled for. Therefore, you lose, and it's not their fault.

You wonder whether they feel the loss too, and you wish they would, so there would be closure, but, you realize they do not. Persons who are always right and never wrong are also impotent of appreciating the respect that others give them, consequently they do not feel the loss of it. They respect only their own selves, as they establish in their minds the authority which they claim and defend at all costs. Those who depart are but lower than they. Therefore, no loss.

It is one-sided then. You see it, you reason, you understand. You could have been talking Chinese all this time. The sound heard was not your voice but applause. Applause that never stop in the mind of the one you had mistaken for a person of substance.

Then you realize. Maybe you were not wrong after all. Perhaps the substance, in that  person, is truly there. Perhaps it is they who cannot see it. Being so busy all their life building elaborate walls of grandeur, they failed to see the walls were never required.

Maybe it was not  a case of having glorified someone unworthy. They might have been worthy indeed, but, so busy in the narcissism of their defensive attack, they never knew it themselves. Striving to prove something they never needed to prove, they lost those who had seen what they never comprehended they possessed.

The loss, then, is theirs. For they lose, every day,  who they truly are, or could have been, by being proud of walls they never needed to have built.

Now, you can only wait. One day they may return, when their arrogance subsides into healthy confidence and when they learn how to hold their arms up in embrace, rather than offensive defense.

 I Am A Rock
Simon And Garfunkel

A winter's day
In a deep and dark December;
I am alone,
Gazing from my window to the streets below
On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

I've built walls,
A fortress deep and mighty,
That none may penetrate.
I have no need of friendship; friendship causes pain.
It's laughter and it's loving I disdain.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

Don't talk of love,
But I've heard the words before;
It's sleeping in my memory.
I won't disturb the slumber of feelings that have died.
If I never loved I never would have cried.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

I have my books
And my poetry to protect me;
I am shielded in my armor,
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.
I touch no one and no one touches me.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

And a rock feels no pain;
And an island never cries.