The loss of anything, however big or small or living or materialistic, if treasured, is felt very deeply. A book lost, can make some people cry and despair, or a phone lost can make others rage and walk around with a storm cloud around their heads. If a person is lost its worse, or sometimes its its viewed as a happy occasion.
I am an absent minded person most times in my life, and I have lost various things over the years. These items I have either treasured or was entrusted to my care. The first most deep loss for a non-living thing or a materialistic thing I ever felt, was for a raincoat that had been handed down to me from my older cousin brother. I remember clinging to the window grill of my childhood home crying for the one most beautiful thing I had at the age.
After that, it was other stuff like school sweaters, earrings, socks, shoes, books etc. and none of these ever gave me the sense of loss that that yellow raincoat had. A couple of years passed before I felt it again, and this time it was for the largest amount of money my father had entrusted the 14 year old me with. Loosing it made me feel worthless and, after the bout of self-pity was done with, rage for my careless attitude. The rage went on for a couple of days before I gathered the courage to forgive myself my carelessness.
This initial loss of money hardened me to future losses of the same kind, either by my own carelessness or because of other people's miserly attitudes. This sort of loss became a sort of regular loss, while the loss of items of daily use diminished, until an iPod was lost.
I had begged and pleaded my parents for years for an iPod and finally a relative had gifted it to me and I had hurried up and misplaced it. This was the second most important materialistic loss I had suffered. A couple of weeks after moaning over the lost item, I got my head straight and started saving up until I could buy myself the iPod my parents had never wanted to buy me. When I walked into the iStore the day I bought myself the music player, is a day I will never forget. The joy of selecting the iPod and paying the money I had saved up I cannot sum up in words. It was one of the best feelings I have had, and till this date I treasure my music player deeply.
My habit of loosing things seemed to have died out after the loss of my iPod, but then it resurfaced for a tiny period of time when I lost the headphones I was very proud of. This didn’t bother me much though as I hadn’t realized they were lost until a couple of weeks later. This habit of loosing things just stopped after that. I was careful with everything I had on my person wherever I went, and made sure I got back home with the items.
And just to hit me in the face, reality popped up and brought my carelessness along with it for fun and I left my phone in an auto. To make matters worse, it wasn’t even my phone, I was using my brother's. I had bought the phone for his 14th birthday and then once my own phone started acting up on me, I had started using his.
Finding out I had lost the phone and then realizing that it wasn’t mine to begin with, was one of the most acute feelings of loss I have had to experience. The dreary task of informing my parents came and went; it didn’t go well. They reminded me about all the previous items I have lost and gave me a small lecture if you may on my carelessness with a disappointed tone. If there is one thing on the earth that terrifies me more than any other, its the tone or look of disappointment people adopt when they talk to me. I am terrified that I will end up a disappointment to everyone and worst of all to myself even.
The call was made and I was asked to go give a complaint to the police, which I did. The man was a reminder of my father, telling me strictly that I am negligent and careless and all other forms of the sentiment. This being one of the only emotions I cannot handle, I started to tear up in front of him, and just nodded dumbly to everything he said to me, agreeing right away that I am a silly girl with not a care in the world.
He saw my tears and softened his tone and instructed me on how to go about the process of complaint giving, and then I left. The constable outside of station stopped me and said everything would be alright and in his own way tried to stop my crying. I informed my father about the police station, but made sure to leave out the crying bit, over a local telephone booth and after I hung up, I hopped onto a bus and traveled to my work place.
On my way, guilt and anger fought against my pride. Deciding that the only way I would get rid of the war going on in my head was if I worked somewhere and got the money, I stopped thinking of the issue, and turned my mind towards the philosophy of the subject.
I remembered all the various people I have come to treasure and then all of a sudden, just lost them. And not once did I feel the sense of loss I have felt for non-living things as much as I have for these people. In fact I felt glad that they do not feature in my life any longer and other such feelings of relief. Sometimes its better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all, and whoever said that really never knew what he was talking about. People come and go and that is a fact of life; its similar to the cycle of birth and death, but different in the fact that these people are born into your life when you get to know them, and they die painfully and slowly or quickly when they leave.
These people are more easily forgotten or rather just pushed violently and speedily out of ones minds and hearts. But as always there are exceptions to this unofficial rule, when people actually die in real life, the loss that one feels then is inexplicable. It is a sort of loss people cling onto, in the hopes that somehow they are wrong and the dead and in fact really alive and it was all a horrible nightmare. Even years after the death people cling onto them, never really letting go or coming to terms with the loss.
Loss of any kind though, really never settles right in the stomach 9 out of 10 times, and is regretted at some level for a long time. Sometimes materialistic loss grieves a person so much so that he looses his or her own life to that emotion; he either kills himself, or she runs away trying to forget, or he takes to drink and slowly looses everything else he could have saved, or she fights an endless and pointless battle with herself or those around her.... the list goes on and on.
To be fair though that's the case with only a small number of people, the rest just move on with their lives after a little bit of grief or guilt. These are the people who have the strength to stand up when pushed down, these are the people who are the role models the world needs, but then again, no one wants to know that they aren’t perfect, and the loss of the knowledge of their imperfections might just break them.
In the end, its always the material losses that one experiences that wrecks havoc on a persons life. In the end its never enough, nothing ever seems to be though.
