All The Little Bits Of Us

I believe a major part of life is shedding bits of you and depositing them in places, people and objects.

I am not sure what form of writing this is.

Is it a story?

Is it an essay?

Or is it just the whispers of my soul captured in writing?

I often think of writing as a form of fettered liberty.

Because, as I write, I let loose the thoughts that sit deep in my heart.

But that emancipation is only ephemeral. My thoughts are free, just long enough for them to transmute into the prison that we call words. In words, I express myself, release my thoughts, and imprison them in the letters I write.

Life is about shedding bits of you.

Animals shed their skin or fur, plants shed their leaves, and we, humans, shed bits of ourselves. As I look back, the past tugs me in a familiar way. It is what we call nostalgia. Indeed, I felt a strong wave of nostalgia when I visited LUTH to say goodbye to friends who were moving away. As we spoke, in video games, banter, silence and shared pastries, I could not help but mourn a future that would never happen.

The future I could have shared with my friends lay trapped in their green passports, between the stamped visa paper and the passport booklet page. Perhaps, visas themselves are a sort of burial ground for all the futures the migrant leaves behind. Whatever the case may be, I find solace in this fact — That although the future where my friends and I gather in my home during the weekends to discuss sweet nothings may be dead, this death is not the end of our possible futures together. Isn’t that the appeal of the future?

Tomorrow is pregnant, and no one knows what it will bring. There is no reveal party for the future. All we have is the waxing and waning nature of the optimism we hold about it.

Now, back to the shedding of self. Can you think of all the places that hold bits of you? I can think of a few. From my primary school, where I have my earliest memory (amebo, I won’t tell you), to LUTH, where I made many remarkable memories. Many places hold bits of me. You may have your criteria about what it means for a place or person to have a bit of you, but mine is this — When you pass by a place or person and feel the tug of the past, resonating deep in your soul, along with the pull of the present, reminding you of who you are, and where you are now, then that place or person holds a bit of you. I feel this every time I have to go to LUTH or drive past my childhood church. To be nostalgic is to be caught in a tug-of-war, between what was and what is, while you thread towards all the things that could be.

In the shedding of self, we repeat the never-ending cycle of life. Unions and partings. The nostalgia we feel when we think about past places, people or objects is a kind of mourning. An ode to the life we once had, but have no more. In our lifetime, there must be partings, from friends that go away, from dear ones, places and even objects. It is fitting that we leave behind little bits of our essence with them. After all, can a man live without cleaving unto something or someone?

In many ways, regardless of what you go on to accomplish, in the shedding of self, you tell the world — ‘I was here.’

For Kenomola.