This is gonna be one confused post.
Its a train of thought, of which I have one end, but cannot quite comprehend where its leading me to.
The point was about relationships - the myriad relationships a person goes through in his/her lifetime. Was trying to list out the ppl who have touched my life - yeah kinda jobless, so can indulge in these mind games. But how do you model a relationship, digressing maybe, but its like - If it were a db, it would be an E-R diag, list out all the participants aka tables, define the foreign key constraints and viola, u have the map. If it were a design and u were charting class dependencies maybe, a UML diag - the relationship would be a generalization, dependency or association with annotations / stereotypes / tags adding the exact nature of the relationship.
But in life, how would I model it? I tried to picture myself standing alone and a jumbled up assortment walking in and out of my life : friends - some whose faces I struggle to recollect (won't even bother with names); teachers - some who moulded me, the others for whom teaching was just a job; my family - parents, cousins, aunts, uncles; colleagues - some of whom doubled up as friends; total strangers with whom I've shared some good moments. Some lingered, some stayed longer, but everybody moved on at some point. Which translates to the ephemeral nature of relationships.
Of these - and I'll leave family out of the equation for now - the ones I really cared about would be a single digit number. Relationships which I nurtured and hoped would endure. That's kind of a naive belief and its the death, no that's too harsh a word, its the drifting away of these relationships which have caused the most turbulent upheavels in my life. Though, whether it affected me for good or bad is up for argument.
And I've noticed that the effect varies as you grow older. When I was in the fifth grade, my best friend had to relocate to Madras, I cried the whole day, fought with her dad and told him he was a beast to separate us. But life continued - we stayed in touch for a while thru' letters, but gradually moved onto other things in life. The point is, I got past that pain very soon. The parting of a best friend in school was a little more tougher, but even that was a phase I got over.
It was the parting of friends, with whom I chose to share my life in the real sense of the word, which caused the maximum pain.
The time my friend relocated to the US was killing - every moment I spent shopping with her till we parted at the airport, I kept preparing myself for the pain to hit me. It didn't, and as I was waiting in the lounge for the plane to take off a good 2 hours later, I dissolved into tears... Don't get me wrong, we stayed in touch, still do, but things kinda change. Helped that the airport is home to such scenes, maybe that is the reason I hate airports. But the long and short of it is, each parting affected me mentally.
I've spent nights thinking why the loss of a relationship weighs down so heavily - is it the loss of a person who shared some real good times with you, is it the feeling that there was something u could have or should have done to set things right, is it the thought of having lost out on a real good person you could share your thoughts with, what is it?
And it kinda draws me back from forming the next relationship, been there done that.
Its a jumbled post alright, and I don't have answers.
