How strange humans are! They think they cry for love, yet they are really crying for attachment. Yes, sometimes people cry not in love, not in passion, but trapped in the web of attachment. When the person who left the deepest wound in the heart comes to mind, sleep breaks in the middle of the night, tears burst from both eyes. When their memory strikes at noon, sobs wrench up from the chest with a howling sound. Something burns to ashes somewhere within, and keeps on burning.
The mind asks, What is this person to me now? The heart replies, This person is still my life!
The thought that the departed person has hurt us causes pain, but a hundred times more painful is this imperishable memory: this very person once wept uncontrollably at my slightest hurt. This very person once lulled me to sleep with songs in the most tender voice. The person who now hangs up the phone on my face and warms their heart with some third, new voice—this same person once could never fall asleep without hearing my voice. How much time changes everything!
We remain trapped not for the person, but in the attachment to memories entwined with them, and so we writhe constantly in this anguish. The heart only burns and keeps on burning.
When their favorite song drifts from somewhere, the heart weeps—the song I once waited to hear in their beautifully off-key voice. Their favorite color, beloved poems, or even their preferred tea stall brings a terrible melancholy. In such moments of heartache, suppressed tears awaken with bitten lips, sometimes a gentle smile dances in the pupils.
Eventually we learn to hate not the person, but the memories. Yes, at some point or another we learn to hate that tea stall where we sat together, that road we walked hand in hand, even that hooded rickshaw we rode together. Not the person who left, but the time we left behind seems like the great deceiver. Yet for that person from those beloved times, something nameless remains somewhere in the heart till death. That something keeps binding us perpetually—in love, in forgiveness, in prayer.
Love dies eventually, leaving only a kind of habit. That memory-soaked habit chews and devours every inch of our liver. When we try to escape from it, we wonder, How can I flee from myself! Illness of the body can be cured with treatment, but when the heart burns out, no path to survival remains open.
These memories accumulate in our body and mind like termite mounds. Those termites eat us bit by bit; the mind dies long before the body's death. We drag and haul life along with this dead mind. The ability to remember, so celebrated for school exams, is equally suicidal for life's tests.
Memory has no eraser. If it did, we would see countless people in this world living in peace, who have murdered themselves with their own hands trying to save themselves from memory's burning.
The person now belongs to someone else—this truth eventually becomes bearable. What never becomes bearable is only this memory: this person, yes, this very person was once mine...completely and entirely mine alone!
In this world, no one really belongs to anyone. When this realization comes, it is truly too late.
Someone's corpse doesn't pain us as much as the beloved, murderous memories spent with them.
This is perhaps why, even when the departed person returns, we send them away empty-handed again and again, though the very next moment we see the clock's hand wanting to stop for someone unknown, eyes moisten at the sight of moonlight, lips tremble at the touch of rain...alas, for whom do I die once each day! I cannot take the person, yet I cannot let go of their memory—this is what living means.