Friday 3 February 2012

The Absent Presence


This is the feeling of emptiness and despair in someone's absence. Their presence is absent, and so is your power to defeat loneliness.


It is an incredible feeling to miss someone to the extend where you can sense their presence next to you. Sometimes it is subjective and self-induced but other times it is genuine and neutral. You sit there collecting all the sweet memories and tender moments, wishing they would suddenly reappear in your life. You look at photos, listen to songs, hoping that you will receive a text saying 'I think of you too, sometimes'.

But when it never happens, you have to forcefully snap out of the past and ensure that you are creating new memories here, now. The only challenge in doing so is that you'll soon be reminiscing the moments you are creating now. So to what extend can anyone ever fully live here, now? The past is a major component of who we are in the present and to live as though the past does not effect the present is almost impossible.

Fortunately, it sometimes effects one's personality positively where he uses the experiences as a lesson. I used to say 'love as though you have not been hurt before' until someone corrected me by saying 'love as though you have been hurt before' because that is when you will know how it feels. 

You live, you learn. The way we are treated is possibly the way we have treated people in the past, either consciously or unconsciously. So an attempt to treat people the way we would like to be treated would probably bring the absence of loneliness and would restore the presence of the present.