CHENNAI : I am letting go of someone I love, and I am doing it by looking at all the ways it’s been done to me and learning from all the mistakes I made as I’ve done it before. I’m thinking of those who disappeared on me — “ghosted” is the word now, and how that haunted me. The one I’m letting go of doesn’t know it, but I’m already gone, and one of these days a reckoning will come when they will force me to tell them why. I can’t begrudge that. I have asked that question of others. I have deserved an answer. But I’m thinking especially of those with whom I chose not to converse with, because to do so would be to tell them something that would turn them against me permanently, and with — I know from having been burnt by truth- telling — consequences.
I saw a video of a painting made of black powder on a linoleum floor of a cat and a snake. A broom hovered over the two figures, then swept their scales and stripes into a meaningless pile. I wondered at the risk the person who’d made this had undertaken — what if the camera wasn’t on? Would they recreate the entire sequence again — the painting and destruction both? How many times?
What I really wondered was why they did it at all — how can anyone make a beautiful thing and then destroy it? Then I recalled sand mandalas, how Tibetan Buddhist monks painstakingly paint elaborate symbols using coloured granules, only to ceremonially undo them. Not with the effacing glee of a broom, but part by part, in sequence. The sand, collected in a silk-wrapped jar, is then released into a river. Such care in the dismantling.
Everyone I love, I try to raise into my way of loving. This was what had gone wrong with this situation too. In my desire to remake another, I could only elevate them into loving me well, but could not impact how they are fundamentally wired. Which is to say: they learned just enough, but not enough. We arrived at a place where the seed of hatred they hold in their heart had overwhelmed everything else I saw — and wanted to see — in them.
My own heart is so small, I rued and rued, until someone changed the narrative for me: to refuse to make space for cruelty is not itself unkind. Not, itself, incapacity.I thought I built citadels out of love. Or gardens. Sanctuaries. At least, I can say with certainty that this is what I have always tried to do. But if I am honest, fear and memory have made me build sand castles at times, sown with eventuality. I don’t think this was one of those times, but I’ll take my cue. A sand mandala, then. Made more and more beautiful with tending, with each intricate addition and every surprising colour. Not a ghosting, not a burnt bridge, only a meticulously reconfigured arrangement. Not with words, for mine are blades.Not with messengers, for that is cowardice. Only this intention: silk-wrapped, released into the elements, and with so much love, let go.