The very first photo I have ever uploaded to my blog. A collage of campus places and the seaside trip with the family. This was just an experiment. Eventually hope to put up a travelogue-type post. Hopefully. Pictures of places look good, but I think a picture becomes a little more interesting if there are people in it. Sort of enhances the character of the photo, lends it a story and time. Perhaps coz people age and though places do too, they do so rather slowly... the passage of time can be observed better if one knows the people in the picture. 

Hello Hi Goodbye!

So many people. 
So little time. 
So much to say. 
Silence divine.

Old friends, old expectations...
Changed people, broken promises.
Some laughter, a little sorrow.
Everything shall be gone, by tomorrow.

Why is it so difficult
to say I miss you?
Why is it easier
to pretend you love the new?

Goodbyes were already said.
So why did you return?
To haunt me and taunt me.
To laugh as my heart burns.

Partings were never easy
But they get harder every time.
And yet meeting once more seems far better
than to part for ever and ever this time.

Forgive the bad rhyme, but prose just sounded way more stilted and trite than this. There have been so many goodbyes, so many "catch-you-laters" in the last year or so that one might think that it shall get easier the next time. But it just gets worse. And I know that there shall be many more in the years to come. Still, a thousand goodbyes are way better than to never meet all these people again. Love you guys!

To let go and yet love so much...

I miss this lady who was strong and wise and fun and all things warm and wonderful. My grandmother. She has been gone a month now yet in my mind she lingers on. Sentimental do you call me? But really, on a day to day basis, I do not wallow in sadness and despair... nor does anybody else who loves her. Simply because that is not the way to be. If a life has been well and fully lived, you cherish the memories of that person and go on with the rest of your life with the utmost zest. What does hurt and hurt bad though is that sudden moment in time when I think of her and it strikes me anew that someone I love is never going to be mine anymore... those half-written but never sent letters, those many conversations that were yet to be had, old stories that I was going to listen to some day. Stuff I want to tell her... so many times to come in my life that I want her to know, to be there with me all through. And it is only at those freakish moments that I cannot help but let the tears fall. At all other times, I am strong. Some things you just gotta learn to live with and smile through because the person you are thinking of deserves all those smiles :)

She was an amazing lady. If a gal needed a role model, she would have been the ideal one. Not that she would have pointed herself out as a perfect person. Constant improvement, constant progress, constant effort. Determination and the strongest and most resilient will I have ever come across. So much wisdom gathered through a lifetime of experience. Makes me wonder if that is the way of life, to learn all along and yet to take a lot of it along with you. She was a teacher and her students must remember facets of her that I must have never seen. To me she was this person that was tied in with this place.  A place that felt like home always. Maybe because I spent a while growing up there. Being her eldest grandchild made me feel selfishly special. Like she would always love me that little bit more than everybody else. 

For me, that she was a wonderful human being is manifested in the fact that she brought up her own children to be some of the finest people I have ever known. Incredibly loving, strong, sensitive, yet upfront and honest and each unique. That she let each one of them be the independent person they could be, never let them be fettered and still made sure there were strong bonds between them... tells of the person she was. No wonder my grandpa loved her so much! Never a person to let anybody take her decisions for her, she took in the best of all the worlds she could visit and created her own best version of it. It worked well enough for her. Or so it always seemed to me.

There are so many facets of this lovely lady who has been an important part of my life... her teaching, her experiences, her people, her plants and the mad love she felt for them... this list can be unending. So much I can say, and yet so much I don't know about her life. I realized only after she was gone that there were so many people in her life, so many untold tales, and they are probably lost to me forever now. It is funny how one person can have been enmeshed in the lives of so many others... may be that is the essence of being a human being. You must reach out and meet new people, let them into your life and become a part of theirs. That way, you live just one life but you get the experiences of so many... Like living a million lives all at once.