So, over the weekend, I lost something, and I found something. Both were very strange, and had an impact on me like a swelling tide. I could feel it bringing itself to a crescendo, and then slowly, with the force of the ocean, pulling everything away from me till it felt hollow. 

I don’t want to dwell on the thing I lost, because I lost it through action, and I don’t regret that. As and when the regret does come, I am sure it will be fine as it will be regretting an action, and not in action.

However, the thing that I found was something which I had lost 12 years ago. Again, I don’t want to go into details, but it was something that I thought I had lost at a house party. It was a Halloween party, I was pretty far gone, and I thought it had dropped out of my pocket on a night bus. At the time I was gutted because it was an birthday present from my closest friends, and I don’t think I ever told them because I was embarrassed and sad about the whole thing.

So years passed, and I am not exaggerating when I say every year I thought about it. Normally at Halloween, but occasionally on birthdays or just randomly. And as with all things, time passed and I forgot details of it. Its size, the feel of it, all the little details until it became just a faded memory.

Yet this weekend I was at my mother’s house, looking for my copy of ‘Never Let Me Go’ and some gloss paint varnish for oil paintings when, in between two books I saw something metallic. Pulling it out, I had found it. This thing that I had lost and mourned. Like some key that unlocked something in my memory, my past came racing back. I had put it there the night of the party, and it had lain there, forgotten, for 12 years. The weight in my hand, the little dents on the inside when I opened it, everything was there, and my mind filled with a series of racing thoughts. Saturday was a day of loss. Something that would effect the future in some way. However, this thing in my hand was from my past. It made my history real, and gave it a marker. I thought of all that had changed since I had it last in my hand.

A lot had changed. Some for the good, some for the band, but irreversibly changed. I saw my nephew too, and this item was so much older than him. Yet he had easily replaced the past. He became more than anything, and made the future so much more important. In a way, finding this thing I found, made me sad. Sad because I had clung to its memory when I should have let go. This thing should have been a mere pleasant surprise, yet it obviously had a larger impact on me than I would have guessed.

But it is Monday now, and to quote Kurt Vonnegut, ‘So it goes’

- Anand