To miss
11.12.2022
To miss implies a sincere feeling of not being whole, of lacking a piece of yourself.
One is born whole (regardless of what all those songs and movies might want you to believe). As time progresses, a very important software update is issued and, magically, you're invested with the "ego". You look in the mirror and it's no longer a playful stranger you see, it's you. It really is you, staring back from behind the glass. You touch the cold surface, and you are no longer surprised by its lack of warmth. It's you in the lake, beneath the crystalline interface. It's you in the back of the silver spoon, distorted, yes, but still you. The sudden epiphany goes unnoticed, and time keeps passing by, like it always does.
Somehow, at some point along the way, you decide to value a person or a thing more than yourself. So, you endow it with a minuscule piece of that "me". Regarding a person, a place, or a thing, as a piece of you is the highest honor you can bestow upon it. Being "you" is invaluable. You are still whole, so long as that thing is with you. But as soon as it's gone, as soon as you are, inevitably, separated from it, you start to notice you are no longer whole. There is a missing piece, a gap in your ego. It's gone forever, and the jigsaw puzzle will never truly be complete.
This is why we miss, why we feel a longing for certain things.
Of course, most of the time this decision to surrender a piece of ourselves and replace it with something else, something perishable, distinct from us, non-parallel to our timeline is subconscious, automatic. We, thus, involuntarily, condemn ourselves to a future sorrow, a looming sadness. We're all damned to walk around with holes in the fabric of our souls.
But how incredible is this? It is in our instincts, in our programming, to eventually prize something so much, even more than ourselves, that we overwrite our primordial instinct of self-preservation. All of this for the sake of something so ephemeral, something that cannot be absolutely possessed.
Yes, there is a lot of evil in this world, but there is also hope. Because hope is our strength, and as long as there still are people who miss one another, or people that miss their pets or their musical instrument or their books, I know we can still hope, we can still save ourselves.
Cover:
Carlos de Haes, A Wrecked Ship, 1883