Alhamdulillah, I was allowed to go home today.
And as much as I’d like to relish that feeling with some mind jottings I made throughout my very short stay in the hospital, this poem is commanding too much of my attention at present time:
One Art
By Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn't hard to master;so many things seem filled with the intentto be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the flusterof lost door keys, the hour badly spent.The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:places, and names, and where it was you meantto travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, ornext-to-last, of three loved houses went.The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gestureI love) I shan't have lied. It's evidentthe art of losing's not too hard to masterthough it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
On www.poets.org, this was listed as a break-up/divorce-themed piece.
On that point, I have to disagree. Nobody ever said that loss becomes more refined only in stories of affairs and romance.
It is just as pure in friendships gone.
I think I may have just lost one.
It had potential. It could have been a very good one. A strong, solid one. Because I saw things in this person that not many did. I saw things that this person thought was hidden from everyone. I saw straight through, and I was proven right.
Not everyone is as mysterious as they think they are.
Beyond all the excessive jokes and put-on humour, there was something there to be taken seriously.
But I never let on that I knew. That I saw.
The funniest part is that that friendship really was never there in the first place.
So how does it make sense that I feel it’s gone?
Enough said here.
