‘The Ones Who Leave’

His intelligent eyes used to pierce you. Why is it that only recently they had started to evade my own, the shy ones in their own right? That was the one who left.

The only explanation that I have as once a close friend is that he slowly worked himself into it, talked himself into it. It all began with a warning from me ‘That’s not the way you go about it. Shouting out loud would leave nothing as your own. Don’t dilute your thoughts.’ I had seen the signs very early, the signs that would change things.

He didn’t feel like stopping at my advice. The final act, the well rehearsed act had to be performed. And once he had diluted quite a few things about his ‘present’ in his head, the place where many foreign ideas were born (not his own), he left…and I was not even here.

I don’t know what I would have said had I been here because the words that passed between us vanished like the corridor that used to lead me to the piercing eyes.

I can only hope that the ideas that remain in his head are his own for as long as there is even one that he considers not an act, he will retain some part of himself.

I met him the last time when we were brushing our teeth, he laughed at something unimportant, which reminded me of the time when he told me, ‘you laugh from the heart Suzie’.

It was you taught me how to laugh from the heart and be fearless about it. I owe my laughter to you buddy. And every time someone tells me that, I think of your amazing gift whose radiance would never fade.

I know how it feels to give up what you have and start over, having done so myself. For the ones who leave, rationale gives way to emotions simply because they are the only wealth you can claim, rest is the rationale owned by intellectuals that surround you and the books they write. Sometimes you just have to find a part of yourself and call it your own. And then you do what your heart says. And it’s not our hearts that let us down.

All the best bud…