I Am Really Good At Losing People

When I was little, I lost people because I moved. I moved because my parents moved. Each year, I would start at a new place, a new school, new friends. I became adept at merging, adapting and being a wallflower. I reveled in how well I could be invisible. It was my superpower.

Somewhere around middle school, we stayed put. I had friends that lasted more than a year. Then I began bulking up. I was noticeable in a way that made becoming invisible hard. So, I covered myself in baggy clothes, earthen shades and camouflage to fill my need to merge into the surroundings.

My first best friend so to speak was when I was a young woman in my late teens. We were in our first jobs working on COBOL projects to avoid the cataclysm that millennium could bring. We shared a tiny room in a hostel. We worked out of adjacent cubes. We were with each other day and night.

We shared a lot of each other’s lives. Mostly, for me though, I shared because I thought sharing meant she owned something of me that no one else did. When I lost her, the loss felt worse than death. I had seen death before. There is a finality to death that is absent in heartbreak. I mourned her a lot longer than I mourned my father.

By the time her loss smarted less and less, I became friends with other people in my new country. We bonded over being immigrants, aliens in a strange land, our roots yanked out of familiar soil and transplanted into arid ones. We thirsted for familiarity, for food, for language, for cultural nuances that did not need translation.

Children happened. We drifted away. I lost a very good friend to motherhood while I mourned children I could not seem to make.

Children came and with it, more mommy friends, but these days, I share a lot less. The losing is getting to be a bit stale. I cherish the bits of me I no longer give away. I will be whole someday.

I am really good at losing my temper. It builds up slowly, simmering with each iteration until it bursts open and spews the venom that has coalesced into something far more harmful than when it began. It spreads like a contagion, affecting the direct target, then spreading its tentacles, ensnaring every being in its path. It taints, causing the air to become noxious.

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