Diya Pradeep Kumar
There’s this strange kind of grief that comes with outgrowing people you once couldn’t do life without. It is the kind of goodbye you cannot prepare for. No final words or embraces where the world pauses and echoes to you,“this is the last time you will ever love each other like this”. It happens quietly, like the cold breeze during winter entering the house through a window you forgot to close. They say we become the people we spend our lives around. I think that’s only half the truth; I think we become haunted by them. For at one point, my entire world revolved around this person from any place you visit, any experience you have to their presence making everything and anything better. Perhaps, that’s why the grief exists. Grief is all the love you hold for them but can no longer express. You can meet new people, make new friends and spend so much time with them but it will be incomparable to that one person, the universe made you outgrow. The morning after is far more testing, for you have to walk through crowds carrying the impossible burden of comparison. The burden of knowing you lost your blue and every other shade cannot hold a candle to it.
For once your eyes have adjusted to a certain kind of light, every other light feels dimmer. You start mistaking familiarity for brightness, measuring every new connection made against the warmth of someone who no longer stands beside you. Even the brightest rooms feel dreary because your source of light remains elsewhere. I think that’s the saddest outcome of outgrowing our people. They leave the rest of the world looking unfinished in their absence. I could never truly encapsulate the intensity of emotions you feel during this terrible phase everyone goes through. Saying that the person I outgrew was my best friend does no justice, for the words are far too small for the space she occupied in my heart. A piece of writing will never capture how I feel, or what this feels like for you. But, it should bring you some consolation that you’re not the only person experiencing this.
I can tell you this much, it will hurt because they mattered. It will hurt because they were once home. But home isn’t a place you’re meant to stay forever at, it’s simply the place that teaches you what warmth feels like. And even if it’s not somewhere you can stay everyday any longer, it is still something you can always find your way back to. You will know the nooks and corners of this home, how they preferred tea over coffee and hated goodbyes as much as you did. They will be a home that will always feel familiar.