Missing Pieces

The last dance is the most painful. It is the final hurrah, the ending of a dream and the firm knowledge that what we wished for will never be. When the song has ended the dancers part and go their separate ways. There is no grandiose bow or an encore. There are no standing ovations or a mad clapping of hands and an audience crying, "Bravo!" There is simply the end and the silence of it all unfolding to this finality.

So many times we postpone the inevitable because if there was any good in it we hope the good can come back. We get trapped in our thoughts of what used to be rather than what actually is. I know I have felt the pangs of, "We were happy. We were so in love and alive." I have a hard time seeing that it isn't that way anymore. I can get blind to the reality of that too much has happened and that the times now are rarely happy and good and right and fulfilling. I get stuck way back at the beginning and the wonders of what used to be. Choosing to let it go can feel like letting a piece of myself drift away. It feels as if I have lost too many pieces of me.

However much we learn in each ending and goodbye, we also lose something too. We lose a hope that maybe had lived inside us for a very long time. We lose a bit of innocence and our ability to just accept at face value. We lose our sense of judgment and second guess our brains and souls and hearts wondering how we could have been so wrong. I think it chips away at all of us. Sometimes we become jaded and bitter though we try to squelch those feelings into the bottom of our being.

People will say the infamous, "Well it's their loss." in their sweet attempts to make the heartbroken feel better. Is it really their loss? It could be. But it is the heart of the heartbroken that is at a loss. With each goodbye we lose something of ourselves though we learn in the process. And what is to be done with all those feelings? How do you get them all out without losing so much more of yourself in the midst of it all? We cry. We yell. We pray. We distance ourselves and hide. We throw ourselves into projects or work or charity drives. We go out with friends or family with the sole purpose of forgetting it all. We go on and do what we have always done and we pretend we are just fine as those pieces of us that we have lost slip deeply under into the business of everyday life.

We eventually come to a day where we look back at it all, our scars and scabs, and say, "I made it through. It doesn't really hurt so bad anymore." And it really doesn't-unless we pick at it. Unless we think about it a bit too long. Unless we examine it in the dark of night when nothing is distracting us. Ahhh, there they are-the little holes-the places and spaces where the pieces are gone. Those spots that are missing the essence of ourselves. They are at times mere cracks in our reality.

There is no closure. I hate the word. In the case of emotions it does not exist unless you suddenly suffer from amnesia and have no memory of it all. We can stick all our feelings and memories in a box in our brains and snap it shut, even wrap it in the funny pages, but what "was" is still inside. It doesn't disappear simply because it is done and over. If it happened, if we loved, if we dreamed and hoped and lived, there is something missing when it's over and there is no pretending it never happened at all. We can even fall in love again and be happy-but in that new relationship, we also take everything that we have endured or enjoyed on our way to get to this new place in our lives.

Each final hurrah is our becoming as much as it may have been our undoing.

Monika M. Basile