life is often like a syllabus
“Maybe he’ll change his mind… I know I shouldn’t be hopeful,” he says to me, from the other end of the phoneline.
I’m at a loss for words, because I understand his emotions and the desperation associated with loosing someone you love through a breakup. I think I know the right words to say, and its a lesson in acceptance, but I know that one year ago I wouldn’t be able to stomach such words. And its only through acceptance, which usually follows bouts of depression and gritted teeth, that growing happens. It’s certainly something one learns for himself, through trial and error, and even then one is subject to fall again at the next drawback, to feel as though he or she has learned nothing at all. I suppose that’s life - constantly seeking retribution and fulfillment while treading a hamster-wheel.
“I just talked to Clair, and her grandfather died,” I tell my mother, while smoking a cigarette. “Her grandmother died earlier this semester.”
“That happens a lot,” my mother says as she rests a mop on the countertop. “I hope that I die after your father dies, I can’t imagine being eighty without him.”
I think about Clair, and all the pain she is experiencing due to the loss of her grandfather. I then try to imagine her grandfather, at how death likely trembled more at him than he did at death.
I remember my mother saying similar things when I was a child.
“I hope your father and I die in a plane crash, or something. Anything - as long as we’re together.” I couldn’t figure out where I fit into this statement. What about me? A double loss would be much more excruciating than a single one. At that time, however, I knew nothing about love, or what brings and bonds two strangers together in such a dynamic, unexpected way. I knew nothing about how two lives can weave together into one.
Sometimes acceptance is very subliminal. I don’t feel like I accepted anything about my breakup a year ago, but I know that I accepted it, because I have grown tremendously as a person. It just seemed more like a messy conglomeration of mistakes, mishaps, and self-loathing that landed me where I am today - happy and awaiting the next trial. I guess that’s what happens, you recover only to have the capacity to recover again, from the next windfall-turned-devastation.
Life is often like a syllabus in a course of rejections. You accept smaller rejections (breakups, etc) until ultimately you are forced to accept the ultimate rejection, which is death - when life literally eliminates you. Or, rather, its in acceptance that one finds life. To the contrary, it isn’t through penance and retrogade that one finds death. Paradoxically, life finds death, or, syllogistically, acceptance finds death. Thats when the wheel stops admist its rotation, and the greatest of all realizations is achieved - you stop realizing.