Sometimes feeling is enough

A confession to the affective

Every time I look at my palms I am reminded of all the things that I have let go. Control can be such a cruel master, especially when you know your hands were made to bear the weight of things. My wanting and hope that all my prayers will come true are all part of the same litany of desire. Sometimes I think I am greedy, but when I am kinder to myself, I think i just want to own at least a modicum of my existence.

Of all the things I let go, it seems to me that love is the hardest. In my head, in the encounter and process of love I offer a piece of my spirit to strangers. “Here,” I say, be it may a glimpse into my childhood or the fears I choose to keep hidden in my closet. Equally, its also them giving confidence that I too return the same responsibility. Keeping their secrets, and loving their own fragility. Letting that go, that whole process of reciprocation, of mutual trust, of keeping each other’s spirit seems to be my most human dilemma.

Sometimes I ruminate. A human cant help but feel that they are betrayed of all their confidence. Most times I regret ever giving a chance for shared humanity -- of love I mean. But when I am kinder to the loves I lost along the way, I may be simply yearning for the piece I have left in currency of their leaving. This spiral of righteous indignation, of ego deaths, and clawing at the feet of those who I love are things I face as a consequence.

So every in every iteration, I feel. In this process of ‘letting go’ I have come to peace that loving and loss do not lie in the province of the logical. Ergo, giving justification as to how a lover or a friend decided to leave could never truly be explained in the deduction of things. Perhaps there is some wisdom to this, maybe that through retracing one’s steps in the sand one may find out that they walked three paces farther from a distant moment.

But for most of life the ocean consumes all traces of passion no matter how valuable, reminiscent, and nostalgic. Recollection erodes and truth in retelling is unbecoming as the storyteller. In arguing for what caused a point of reality to another, we are lost to minute details and spiral into the abyss. Then there is also the question of fact, that we can only retrace our own steps for that matter. When the ocean reclaims the sand, we could only look to the distance.

Ultimately, we are left to our own existence.

I have come to peace to the idea of not being able to give justification to an act of love and letting go. That in the cycle of rumination, of thinking in modes of past, present, and future we are only gifted with the dread of possibility. Feeling then, as designed to be by most as the lower alternative, may present the vein of truth we seek in this desperation.

I have no conclusion to this thought experiment, for I too am threading this world with a candle in the dark. But I offer the wisdom, that feeling sometimes is enough.