Are people, phases of your life?
Are kids phases in their parents’ lives? At different ages, different phases? When they fly away, the empty nest phase arrives with a whole new world of opportunities for all parties involved?
Are friends phases in friends’ lives, with physical distance, comes a little emotional one too? You grow apart and then maybe you can’t relate to any more.
Are lovers the most difficult phases of them all? For they leave a phase of heartbreak behind.
You are the sum of a few important people in your life, they say. Makes perfect sense. For a little of each phase, each person that has passed has changed me and stayed with me thus. If it stays though, has it passed?
My daughter, she has these egg-phases. For months she ate plain boiled egg, with no salt or pepper. Then there were weeks of omellette – this time there was salt and pepper only to be followed by days after days of a recipe she saw at a friends – baida roti*. Currently, we are at bhurji**.
The egg stays constant, the flavors change.
We are the same; people come and go. Of course, there are constants, our pillars, our soldiers. But, the ones who are not, they too add to my life, nourish me so.
Then why do they feel like phases? Why does it feel like they have moved on and we are left behind? We manage fine without them, but the emptiness stays. We don’t miss them much either, yet something’s amiss.
The attachment stays, then why is there a pre and a post era? Something changes. Of course, nothing is permanent, everything is transient, ya-di-ya-da-da. We adapt, we figure it out, tra-la-la-la. But then, what did that attachment mean? Does it mean anything now?
~ ~ ~
*Indianised eggy-bread (French/German toast) of sorts
**sauted crumbled eggs with Indian spices
