12 special sorrows

1: Watching your father grow older in a slower walk, a collection of grimaces and a silver sheaf of tablets.

2: Finding evidence of your current lover’s ex in a cryptic note inside a book.

3: Photographs of people you love from when they were children.

4: The song- tujhse naraaz nahin zindagi.

5: A friend’s grief that you cannot truly feel, only watch from a distance.

6: Remembering the birthday of someone you no longer talk to.

7: Ordering a thing you longed to eat that does not taste as good as you imagined it would.

8: The delicate, fragile swirl at the end of an elderly woman’s braid.

9: The fear of forgetting the smile, the gestures, the idiosyncrasies, the favourite phrases, the eyebrows, the cooking, the minutest details…of a loved one who has passed away.

10: The last day in a house you are moving out of, where your voice echoes through the emptiness that once held everything you owned.

11: Being too self aware to enjoy a cheap thrill in all honesty.

12: And knowing that cats and dogs you love will occupy only a quarter of your own lifetime.