Where Did You Leave Her?

You may not want to read it, perhaps, it's also the story of your life!!

Should the excitement last forever? Does it? Or, should it? Of anything, for that matter!

Isn’t life a transformation, and should it always be what it was? How much of what it was should remain while it shed its old skin and new skins are formed?

I am talking about relationship, trying to plot the graph of growth in a chart of life!

Have you been through a stage of life where everything and anything that’s beautiful resembles the beauty and character of the person you love? Not just a dandelion or a bunch of jasmine or a garland of roses, but even the refreshing aroma from a coffee cup or and old melodious song played at a shop down the street are enough to lead your thoughts through till the avenue’s end where your beloved resides, waiting! There is a never ending ache, suffocation, clutching of ribs that you experience in the absence of the other, and the silent prayers that you whisper in mind to be the first to be taken away from this world than be left behind after your beloved is gone!

Where did all that thought lead you to, or where did you leave all those thoughts as you grew past the milestones of life and reached at the pavilion of time where you stand today!?

I remember the run up to our wedding! My wife use to – and I am sure she still does – sing very well, and I use to call her up on the phone when she return from work, and how lovable it was then to be listening to her singing of a few lines of what was then our favourite song from an old Hindi movie !

Why then did the sparrow stop singing! Or was it the woods that stopped listening! Where are the streams that once sung chorus to her songs?

I am wondering, in the recent years, how many pages of whatever I would have written – volumes on love, on relationship, on life, on the nostalgic moments from the past and the mesmerizing hopes of the future; they were all compiled as Random Thoughts in my WORDSChamber or a letter to a distant someone behind the rainbows compiled as a “Book of Letters”. And in reflection I realize, in just a few months between our first meeting and our wedding, how many letters did we send, weaving - from a single thread of love connected between the distance that separated us beyond the seas and mountains between the two continents then – weaving intimate conversations of what life means to us and how we intent to build it, brick by brick! Then, the most agonizing moments were two: one, when she will have to keep the phone and leave, and the other, to select the most lovable greeting card for whatever reasons I wish to send! I have in an old chest at home an old leather wallet that still has a fresh and crisp currency note sent to me on a special day; what I can buy with that note now is much lesser than what I could have bought with it then, but it’s just the value of currency that has devalued, and it is precious still when I think of the moments she would have went through, buying them, and packing them, and driving in her scootie to the post office to post them, and the last look perhaps at the postman with a humble plea to please take care of it!

I now wonder, I haven’t written to her an email for ages since!

Why then did the peacock stop dancing with its words spread out, or is it the rainbow that disappeared from the sky that stole its hope of rain to come!

I realized the other day, how surprising it is all !!

A week ago I reflected on this and wrote:

‎"I am intrigued by the paradoxes that surround us; down the street is a mason who could build for you a palace, yet lives in a hut; next lane is of a goldsmith who could craft for you an artful piece of an ornament, yet not own a stud; there sits a carpenter with his chisels and hammer, carving out soulful shapes for an arch for the rich, and his window is covered by an old worn out cloth! There is a book of destiny all these are credited to, in the end !"

The untold story was more than what was told!

There in that house is a lady bringing up two wonderful daughters – wife of a self-proclaimed poet – who could only read the poems and verses that her husband wrote for the world, and none for her!

Why can’t she get the poems to read, for her?

Why should she be a spectator in the pavilion, and not the dancer herself on the stage?

And I found the answer too.

What was love at the beginning transformed!

When love transforms to a better shape – when it is all done by rubbing with rough edges of life’s tests and has done its walking through the parks and between the pine trees, when it has seen the summer and lived through the autumn - it takes shape of respect of a particular kind, an inexpressible guarantee of a special belongingness that transcends the excitement of love.

Yet it intrigues me.

The script of life and the love that it is made of!!

Is it the story of your life too?

Shahir Kutteery

The End !

There are moments you come across in life where the closets of memories are sorted and clearedto take a few of the best ones with you to the future; a conscious transition marking an end and the beginning. The moment of cutting that umblical chord that connects to a series of special moments in the past have to be carefully held and truncated to move on to the future. It’s an aching moment.

Silly though it may sound, I feel that ache as I woke up this morning. Perhaps there was a build up to this since a week.

I am shifting to my new accommodation today – from Naz City to Elegan Hills !

It’s nearly a year since I came to this place; to take time as a scale to measure its significance would be as containing ocean in a mustard shell ! The days and months that lead to arriving here in Erbil, and the months that followed till now has great significance beyond what the Time could contain. The experience of living together with strangers who became friends and grew to be emotionally inseparable, the stages of transitions from strangeness, to dislikes to likes to loving and caring, the invisible bond it help us build in sharing those personal space, and the understanding that it developed of each others’ taste of living, their personal hopes, likes an dislikes – these would have not happened if it were not for the opportunity we had to be together. Clive, George, Devrim…all of them leaving a special memory of their own unique ways of living – one that perhaps we would never experience again, together !

And then there was the world I built within that world of a shared space – a shielded space of my own where I gardened my thoughts and nurtured my hopes; a world small in physical space yet so expansive as it could contain the whole of the past and till the edge of future, with an ever shifting horizon.

I don’t know if I will miss this place; but I know I have been sensing an ache as I pack my things; every steps are the last of its kind; every moment, one that will never come again. I have never enjoyed packing; to pack is always to part from something, someone. It has always been a symbol of disconnect; it always had a tinge of ache. When you take things with you, and when you leave things behind, you are not just taking or leaving it physically, but a piece of memory with it; you might forget it, and it may be insignificant in the larger scheme of life, yet, there is a gap of time from now till then when it is forgotten and transition into being insignificant.

What is an ‘end’ has always been a new beginning.

What is endless?