I’ll Know I Thought So

How do we capture a thought, a feeling? We word it and store it in our cupboards and mailboxes. We record it verbatim in videos. We even attach it through memory to snapshots of the past. But mostly, we don’t capture it; it embeds into our being on its own…

Not all thoughts and feelings get captured, nor they linger on forever. Only a few, limited number survive. Some of them we can recall while thinking back, some come alive from triggers attached to them. But the most interesting and perhaps the most important I feel are the ones that come up when we are neither recalling them nor can we locate the trigger.

A laughter would fall in the first, a smile in the second and a tear in the last…

How regularly have we have sat down with friends and family whiling away a good number of hours laughing about the ludicrous things we did (knowingly/unknowingly/drunk). How often we have had those smiles when some songs remind us of fabulous times spend a long time ago. And how rarely have we been glum of a sudden pang running through our bodies for reasons unknown.

Reasons unknown become reasons known and the pain dissipates. We look for the why, we get the reason and we reason the reason. Be it the obvious “Death is Inevitable” or the obscure “He is gone to a better place”, be it the factual “Nobody can see or experience everything” or the illusory “He is still with us right here inside our hearts”, they all serve the same purpose. They move the feeling from where it hurts the most to a more comfortable reasoned place where it stays till we forget and it resurfaces some other day.

My experience tells me the feeling is more potent that we give it credit to be but the reasoning serves its purpose too. Once bitten, twice shy might be overused but that is how our defenses function. The next time we aren’t taken in by surprise, the next time the walls are up. The next time death gives you lesser tears and more humility, for when you see another of the souls-you-know missing, you know it will all come to pass and so will you…

But that August night, that sinister smile, that insane advice, that useless fight… It remains etched in stone. A stone which never weathers, at least I think so... at the least I will know I thought so…