The Great pain of Separation

Once a great Malayalam poet said, “To sum up, Life is a combination of relationship and separation”. When I read this first I thought it was absurd. I had never had it in me to write poetry. It was partially because I believed that it takes a complete control over the language and some components that are more than language to write poetry.

In an abandoned book I found in a hotel room during my last visit to Tenkasi, a small town in South Tamilnadu, I found a poem that moved me. The poem made me think throughout my journey to Chennai. The beauty of it was I couldn’t remember a word of it. But the feeling the poem gave was immense and I couldn’t really get over it.

The poet goes on to say that “The weight of the separation is 100 times more than relationship”.  Somehow I found these lines intriguing. Some lines do that to me. On a very upbeat evening when the breeze made us forget that the summer is real in Chennai, the breeze carried a sentence to me. “What have we accomplished in life to celebrate it?” was a simple question. In another day I would have thought nothing of it. But that was a day when the question decided to probe into the intricate crevices of my mind and the darkest places of my heart.

Similarly the lines mentioned by the poet disturb me still. May be in due course I will accept it as the way of the world and start living with it. I just fear it will be a bigger tragedy than questioning it. Leave about the other people who come and go in our life. We don’t care for some, we cry over some. Some people even kill themselves for some. But when we see a bigger picture, I don’t think all these things matter.

The greatest pain of separation is the one which happens inside. When your heart cries to be a writer and your mind and EMI dictate you to be a sales man, there is bound to be a separation. And it is one of the most painful experiences one can go through. These separations will not be noticed by anyone other than the person. Sometime we will have people to talk about it, sometimes you choose not to and the weight of the separation weighs you even more that you will find it harder to even move from the point in which you are struck.

Almost everybody who had called themselves as poets would have written about separation. Previously, I have wondered why. But just like love, separation is also a predominant emotion which needs an outlet. It can be locked up for so long. I wonder if they wrote about the separation of a person from their life or their separation from themselves.

Why did you come with

Prizes and celebration into life

Only to leave without saying

Leaving me in the silence

Thant hang only in the funerals.

All I can do now is to

Drink and flush you out of my system

For my eyes search for yours

In every face I encounter

– Author Unknown