Favourite People

(who we love and leave)

I’d once told her “We’re all drifters,

as we move from someone to someone else,

in search of someone we can call our own.”

.

And she’d thought for a while

and said “Doesn't that make us searchers?

For we find the people we gravitate towards

and slowly immerse ourselves into them -

the way we enter a river on a cold day -

till we are in a shocked embrace,

fraught to begin with, uncertain how it ends."

.

I said “Sounds like my favourite people,

who I can ignore but never leave.”

.

She said “Yes. For you may move away,

but never ever disengage, else

arteries would split,

and you would leave bloodied

chunks of yourself behind.”

.

I looked at her and gently asked

“Do you carry your ex’s inside you,

as veins and hair and tragedy?”

.

She smiled and said “No,

I carry them as twilight and comets and dark skies.

Some have defiled me,

but most have defined me.

A lot of me you see today,

the things you’ve told you love in me,

are traces of people I’ve moved on from,

but who stay as facts as precious as you.”

.

Seeing my consternation,

she melted in me, and caressed my cheek

                                      and looked into my eyes.

“You are my distance from them,

the miles I am from the person I was,

but they have been my favourite people,

the way you are too,

and however much I extricate myself from my past,

they would always remain my passage.

.

You are too loved to be a road,

and as we walk together into the blessed sunset,

we’ve already found our destinations,

you in me, I in you.”

We are what we are. But we are also all the people who have arrived, moved on, stayed in our lives.  People whose very touch may feel like a hug or an abandonment , a benediction or a scare. People we’ve loved  and fought with, people we’ve been secretive about, those we’ve cried for, those who’ve cried because of us. Just as relationships change, we are changeable too.

We are what we are. But we are also the slipstream of our old loves, the undercurrent of those who hurt us, the flotsam of those we wronged. We are also the pressed flowers of compliments, kept long after the fragrance has gone; we are the lees of the good times which make us remember springs and mists; we are the dregs of the nights of short tempers and long knives.

There is so much that is extraordinary in mundane lives, that one wonders what is evanescent and what stays. Would the quiet moment in a sun drop count? Would a poem which made me cry stay? Would the fleeting memory of a summer love still overwhelm after years?

How does memory work? Is it a crucible or a sieve? Does it hold what it does to keep it shimmering and intact for an insignificant day? Or does it let everything percolate down into a cesspool of oblivion, just keeping back those morsels which then find place in our souls.

Every one of us then is an amalgam of the dullness and magic of every person we meet, every feeling we feel, every hurt we give, every bruise we carry. We are never merely the wind and the woods, the street and the home - we are also the stars, the black holes, the pulsars  - we are the whole universe.

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Hear the above poem, with some beautiful music accompaniment!

And, if you liked this poem, hear these others, on evolving relationships -

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