First Breath After Coma

Life requires a series of letting go and moving on, but I doubt that there will ever come a day when I excel in "the art of letting go and moving on". It is always sad to watch someone you have treasured for so long descent into yet another story in your life. You feel desolate and shattered when they effortlessly move on and replace you, as if you never really mattered, while you are still stuck on yesterdays and their past bliss. The realization of them moving on, but without you is perhaps what makes it more difficult to move on. The hole they left, the "absence" becomes a presence that defines them.

It is in our nature to stare at closed doors. We tend to forget that nothing in life is eternal, and that our hearts and feelings are in constant transition. We are not the person we were yesterday and yet, everything we have seen, heard and experienced are what influence and shape us into becoming who we are today. I had been staring at closed doors for too long, become too comfortable with loneliness that I lost sight of who i really am. I was emotionally in a state of coma. Without my realization, I set ablaze every little forlorn hope left within me, holding out for the love I had lost because to be honest, I forgot how to breathe without it. It took a heavy dose of pain, loneliness and long hours of staring into wide empty spaces for me to be wide awake.

There will always be a part of me that pines for the past, because the past is what made me. I may look at the moon and the stars on a cold winter night, or listen to the sound of the chilling wind and think of a lover of long ago. But I will no longer be trapped by the shadows of the past because now, I am free. I have realized that things do not need to stay the same in their stagnant form in order to be perfect. Sometimes in life, a change is required so as to appreciate the past perfection which otherwise would pass by unacknowledged.

Life has a way of unraveling to you the bits and pieces of who you are destined to be. On my journey to the cold and barren land of loneliness and emptiness, I found myself. All the lights went out, and i was alone with my demons. But I learned to see in the suffocating darkness. I learned the beauty of solitude and most importantly, I befriended the darkness that lives inside me, inside all of us. I may not know the whole of “me”, but atleast now I know who I am not supposed to be and what is not meant for me. And as I accept this hard fact, I feel a sense of liberation from the chains that hold me back from soaring high up in the sky. This is it…my first breath after coma.

”For whatever we lose (like a you or me)

It is always ourselves we find in the sea.  -E.E. Cummings”