its just stuff

i have been terribly upset, for the last few weeks. ostensibly, the reason i have been distrubed is because i lost a couple of things. the days were crazy. i flew across the ocean to india, met my family after a long gap of time, tried to adjust to the new house they had moved to, tried to cope with the vague sense of loss of the old familiar house, a lost symbol of a semblance of a root - of special and twisted significance to a disinherited exiled gypsy like me, i met my boyfriends family for the first time, a host of new faces, a new culture, new values, a new ethos, i met my sister and her new family, i met my friends from edinburgh, my home away from home - from where too i had been exiled a year ago, and in the middle of all this newness, i got married.

in all the chaos that ensued, i felt even more unsettled than i habitually do. i felt like everyday i was packing a few essentials and moving somewhere. to my mothers room, to my sisters room, to the wedding venue, the reception venue, to my new husbands aunts house, to his parents home, then back to new york where i live and then in two days to san francisco, where he lives. 

in all this moving and packing and unpacking, i lost two things. of all the things i had been carrying, they were perhaps the most precious: wedding gifts from my new mother in law, and from my new husband, respectively. i searched everywhere for days but i could not find them. i could not move past the loss. i fluctuated between sorrow and a vague sense of emotionless vacuum.

everyone tried to console me, to rationalise, that they were, after all, only 'things'. it didnt mean anything. when we were still there. they people. the relationships. the living. i got their rationalisation objectively, i understood. but still why did i feel the way I did? 

because maybe i am a person of symbols. maybe because i have always been, in different ways, homeless and alone, and the symbols were all i had to cling to. maybe from the earliest times life showed me that people are fickle and love is fleeting. even the most constant of lovers are sometimes lost to death or chance, and best friends to a trans-continental move.

my parents came from india and bangladesh. i was born in syria, i grew up in india and dubai. i came of age in scotland and l live in america. my life is fractured. every one i loved has been lost. to life, to death, to moves, to chance or mood. nothing has ever been constant in my life. except the symbols. so i learned to cling to them. because they are the only things you can control

but i feel inside that i need to unlearn this. that it is just a false coping mechanism of a child born in a confusing complex whirl. i am now an adult. i have a self and i have a love and i have a life. i need to rest my anchors to these things. to my soul inside me and to my love outside of me. and that is what i connot lose