The time has come…
Sorry for all the delays people… internet has been hard to come by in Sri Lanka…but for everyone who’s been asking… here you go:
You know those stupid college essays which ask you to answer the most inane questions that seem so completely irrelevant to your current life that you can’t help but roll your eyes at the administration that came up with them and wonder why you even want to go to that school in the first place?
I remember one in particular that irked me so much when I was reapplying to schools a year and a half ago that I walked around moaning about it for weeks before I finally forced myself to bullshit my way through it. It asked: Who is one person in your life that you only had brief contact with but who made a significant impact on the way you view the world?
At the time, the question seemed utterly pretentious and overly sentimental, but after traveling to two new countries, not to mention a totally new continent, I can finally see the relevance in this question. I have met people in the past six weeks who I have spent days with or hours or sometimes even only minutes with who will forever be etched in my mind because they taught me something I didn’t know or made me laugh or were just plain bizarre enough to be unforgettable. And what’s most incredible for a girl like me, who hates letting go of people, even the shitty ones, is that no matter how funny or how interesting they were, it didn’t even occur to me to try to find a way to keep in contact with them. It just didn’t seem, for lack of a better word, right. Each moment, significant or otherwise, has been amazing but to try to have recreated them in the future would have been futile.
Which brings me to my point. In life, we encounter people in a certain place or time and it may be perfect and magical or mind-blowing or life changing in that moment. But when the moment is over, we move on. I’ll probably never see the man who saw me wandering aimlessly in Hikkaduwa and said I reminded him of his daughter then took me to see the memorial built for the victims of the tsunami that hit Sri Lanka in 2004 again and that’s okay. And I didn’t keep a locket of hair from the Italian woman who captivated me with stories of her work with Doctors Without Borders. Because that would be creepy. And hard to obtain.
There are moments. People occupy spaces in time and then that time ends. Holding onto things longer than you should can only end in misery. My ex filled a moment and that moment was good and bad and fucking crazy and involved every other emotion possible. But that moment is dead and gone. Waaayyyy dead and gone.
So. In a gesture so drastic that it will probably shake the whole of the western hemisphere, I have finally decided to get rid of those lockets of hair (figuratively speaking) and let the moment pass once and for all.
Yesterday afternoon, sitting on a balcony overlooking the Indian Ocean, I took a step that meant more to me than the one I took getting off the plane in India and mournfully deleted every picture, every phone number, and every saved e-mail conversation from my inbox I could find on my computer. I did an entire sweep of it and threw that necklace along with every good and bad memory into the sea, and can once and for all finally say, “fuck him.” I’m moving on.
