I Never Wanted Parts of You Which Were Easy

2022-02-05

I Never Wanted Parts of You Which Were Easy* * From a line in the BBC serial "Vigil" "There are always some bits of light for both of us to take away, but you do want the entire buffet of effulgence." Time and again relationships slip into presuppositions - and we start taking the ones who are closest to us for granted. We find our own needs overriding our sensitivity to the soul-twitches and mood-swingers of our loved one's aching hea...

I Never Wanted Parts of You Which Were Easy*

* From a line in the BBC serial "Vigil"

"There are always some bits of light

for both of us to take away,

but you do want the entire buffet of effulgence."

Time and again relationships slip into presuppositions - and we start taking the ones who are closest to us for granted. We find our own needs overriding our sensitivity to the soul-twitches and mood-swingers of our loved one's aching hearts. So much of what is good in us is drowned in the morass of the quotidian. We deflect, we ignore, we stop noticing, we stop holding, hugging, caring. All that matters is our anguish, our petulance, our paraphernalia.

We are lost in our own contracted world.

And the ones we ignore because of our self-obsession, quietly suffer on the fringes. We fret and we wonder what went wrong. Till the realisation sinks in that though we profess to love somebody, we are only in love with ourselves.

We then realize that much of life’s meaning, and often our own worth, is derived from others. We understand ourselves better, through the wisdom of others, our arrogance is softened when we encounter the simplicity of the truly wise. We are overwhelmed with light when we crack the hard exterior of our self-centeredness.

When we draw people we profess to love towards ourselves, only when our lives are buffeted by freezing winds, or when we realise that the world's adulation is a fickle being, we stand the danger of being rebuffed in turn. Nothing is static in the universe, not even love. And as we pass from one mirror to another, we finally come to the one which is cracked. And in the tragedy of this realisation lies the irrevocability of love which has now given up.

Churn always brings change, and the power of the anguished ‘no more’ has reverberations which can shake our universe.

If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk of the strains in relationships -