Masroor
A continuation of my previous monologue “Kora”.
Well, yeah, that was Kora. He has a habit of reducing matters of infinite complexity to mere fodder for the human ego. Not his fault, honestly. Completely understandable when you are going through a rough patch in life, especially related to that one person. That’s a natural way to handle the pain. I am sure that follows with an episode of stoic monologue again, right, Kora?
But I really want to ask you something.
What else do you think every human relationship is, apart from an exchange of trust and care? Vague, messy, abstract agreements, each with its own unspoken terms. We just gave them different names: friendship, romance, a mother’s love, and whatnot. Nobody signs anything. Nobody reads the terms. Two people just quietly agree to carry a little of each other, and that agreement is the realest thing either of them owns.
You talk about physical smell, clumsy hair, and bad breath as a way to get over so-called love. Great. Remember the pungent smell when you hugged your mom when she was cooking for you, drenched in sweat. Does that give you a reason to hate her the next time she goes against you? You don’t even notice it. You notice her. If what you define as love is something that can be taken away by just smell, well, it’s better to start looking for an old age home, I suppose. Because everyone you will ever love is going to smell, sweat, age, and fall apart in front of you.
You said you loved only yourself, not her. You loved that imagery and imagination of her, a phantom you created. But what else do you think humans have done for centuries?
We have waged war for an imaginary figure, the figures that have the qualities we define as morally good. We built temples taller than our homes for them, burned cities in their name, sent sons to die for flags and gods we never saw. Whole empires rose and fell for a phantom someone imagined first, and everyone else agreed to believe in. And you think you are the first fool to love an image? We all have been doing the same from the dawn of civilization.
You think you are some descendant of the great pessimist Schopenhauer, with a cigar in one hand and the sun setting in the background. Or some ally of Bertrand Russell dissecting your emotions and feelings analytically, with cold logic.
You are not. You look like a child from whom someone stole a toy, and the toy was not hers. It was your own version of her. In fact, you are not even crying; that would have been better. Instead of crying, you are sitting in the corner explaining to everyone why you never liked the toy anyway.
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You think you carry the stoic ideas of Marcus Aurelius on your shoulders. You don’t. If you did, you would show me some strength. And it takes real strength to accept that you liked the person with all their imperfections when they are gone from your life.
The smell. The mole. The sour breath in the morning, the sweat on the neck, the hair stuck to face. You liked the person anyway. End that reasoning there if you have the strength you claim.
Sit with that pain without glorifying it, without taking anything but ache from it. You lost the person, right? Well, the person was never yours. And it’s fine to lose.
You have lost a lot of other things; the only difference being you lost someone this time, not something. A thing does not look back at you. A thing does not choose. That is why this one hurts more, and that is exactly why you are trying so hard to turn her back into a thing. An idea. An image. Something you can argue with.
Because an argument can be won. Grief cannot. You cannot out-think it; you cannot debate it into silence; you cannot write a clever enough sentence to make it leave. So you turned it into philosophy, because philosophy at least gives you something to do with your hands.
By wrapping the feeling in the cloth of intellectualism, what do you think you are doing?
By calling her image the ultimate feed for your ego, what do you think you are doing, other than feeding your ego?
If you are as stoic as you claim, show me some real strength, show me some courage, show me that tolerance, those tears, those scratches, and the wound. Don’t turn it into a verdict. Shooing them away to look like a man is not strength. It is cowardice. You are running from your own heart and calling it discipline.
Life is just another play we all are in, and we are going to leave soon. You think strength is sitting in the audience, analyzing and intellectualizing the heartbreak, critiquing the lighting and pretending you don’t care about the ending?
True strength is when you go on the stage and cry. Face the feeling, face the loss without analyzing, without intellectualizing, without turning it into a motivation for self-improvement. Miss the person on a random Friday for no reason. Let a song ruin your evening. Admit that you still check, that some part of you still waits. That is just what it looks like when a heart was actually used.
That is the internal unbreakable strength, but you never give it a chance to develop. You keep hardening the outside and call it healing. And you think that has helped you become hard? All it has made you is brittle.
And I know it because, at the end of the day, both of us are the same. I am not saying any of this from the other side of it.
