The Fabric Broke Apart

Life as we know it is a continuous phenomenon, beginning at the moment we gain consciousness and ending at the moment we lose it.
A relativistically smooth and continuous series of events…
Its unquantisabilty, metamorphosing a humbly finite sliver of universal time into a collection of infinite memories.
How could you quantize memories, when days go by unrecounted yet milliseconds create impressions that stay on eternally memorized!

But then, standing at one such moment in life and looking back at it,
Why does our life seem discontinuous?

Looking back what we find are different “us’s”, living in different ambiences, in different circumstances and sometimes even with different personalities!

Of course, life is a continuous gradually ever changing process…
In which we grow from infancy to childhood to adolescence to adulthood…
Which sometimes change us beyond recognition.

But is this process always gradual or are there tipping points?
Certain events or circumstances in life that so profoundly alter our existence that even this infinitely smooth fabric of life…Breaks Apart!
Standing at such a moment you quite clearly realize that the life you have lead and the life ahead would never be alike!

I speak to you now, from exactly such a point.

Like so many friends of mine, I myself belong to a group of ‘young adults’ living in denial of their senescence, desperate in holding on to the last straws that bind them to their adolescence.
I lost my last straw when my family shifted from our old home to an apartment.

In some relationships you break up and just loose the other person…
But in others when you break up, a part of yourselves is also lost!

The further I receded from my old home, the further I separated from my past.
He, the childhood “me”, a different individual but vaguely similar, devoid of our binding glue, detached.

Why would he, accompany me, when this house is the only thing that he could still recognize.
His people, his times, his ambience have all changed…
It is only this house which has not.

When other kids had imaginary childhood friends for confiding their secrets, the walls of his room were his sole confidant.
The first crush that he had…
His first rejection and how humiliating it was!
How could he leave this house in which he has confided his heart!
And why wouldn’t he share? When it's walls were such good listeners and understood him so well!

Even these crevices that clutter its façade are wounds of compassion rather than signs of degeneration…
As whenever his eyes overflowed with tears and his heart trembled with fear, his catharsis created a crevice on this crustacean’s outer layer!
As this shell of mortar and bricks could not absorb the grief that overpowered its soft interior.

When other kids read fairytales to discover new wonderlands…
This home was his chimerical terrestrial paradise!
Its lawns great grasslands, its drains mighty rivers, its undulating surface mighty highlands!
How could he leave this place as it his presence that gives magic to this magical land!
As it is his presence that unites its insects and its birds into countrymen rather than mere creatures!

So I move on, leaving him under the protection of his most caring custodian and his most beloved confidant.
Hoping that inside these walls this sliver of universal time would eternally live on.

Hoping that this ‘Quantum entanglement’ that has developed would keep us attached, however far I depart!
Hoping that when someday I return to meet my childhood self, I would find him here…
Whatever be my condition, I would find him as happy as ever, protected by his most beloved custodian.