Q

As a child i could not fathom loss. Everyone – everything – was fixed so decidedly in their respective orbits around my singular world, that i could not imagine them as their own universes.

My first was a bluebottle, proudly captured beneath a plastic container as it wandered on our kitchen sink. Its coat was a gleaming swirl of green-purple-blue, a whole galaxy alive between those tiny wings. For a day it was mine. Mine in a way no other possession was.

But by morning, i was told to let it go or it would die: tiny holes punctured on the plastic lid were simply not enough. Despite (or because) of my fierce and determined love, it was suffocating. That morning i sobbed by the window sill as i watched the bluebottle stretched to its full span and take off into sun.

I sobbed and decided my little heart could not possibly hold a loss greater than this. Years later, i would again choose to lose someone i loved to watch has wings open against the morning light, and realize that was the easiest pain to bear.

The loss that broke the world as i knew it; where everyone is as they should be, but with everything changed. When i understood that death can be willed.

The loss not of a person but of a place, of dislocation and homesickness.

The loss of one vulnerable and fully dependent, in my arms, gone from warm to limp. A loss i had the power to stop but did not.

The loss of one alive but away – a physical loss, a speechless loss, a loss of utter absence. Of something always there – so much always there that i’ve never turned around to check, and now it’s gone.

But through it all i remember that glint of indigo against sunlight. The moment when my tear-streaked seven year old self vaguely understood: this meant hope in a universe that wasn’t mine. Hope that was beyond me, but no less meant for me.