Loss
As I wandered through the ‘berg earlier this evening, after being more or less stood up by the cool Turkish lady who works at my favorite local bakery (who’d agreed to take me out for real Turkish night out, so to speak), I got to thinking about loss.
Sudden loss in the form of death and/or disaster is something we all acknowledge and fear. In all other subcategories, the point of recognition is always more important, and thereby much more difficult, than the actual moment of loss. For example my beloved, ailing grandmother relatively recently gave me an original photo of herself as an acrobat mugging with a midget in a travelling circus, which was how she made a living when she first came to the U.S. Only months after I tucked the photo into a Vanity Fair and threw it into a trash bin at the Fulton St. Mall, did I recognize the loss.
This precious object, which I’d discarded months earlier, came only upon tardy recognition to represent an enormous, aching loss. The kind of loss that tears at your past, present and future. The kind of loss you never really forget.
I just find it amazing that the act of loss can be so totally insignificant. Loss can be painless, even blissful. Recognition, the act of becoming aware, can be so devastating.
One can easily be compelled, quite suddenly, to mourn a place, thing, person or part of the self that was lost long ago. Soundlessly. Anonymously.
But somehow never blamelessly. Perhaps that’s why it’s so painful. The guilt is the sear that cuts through the throb.
And these are the things that fools consider at 4:00 a.m.
