Adieu

K2 is finally leaving the 1 Miramar apartment that I shared with him for a little more than 2 years and I went to see him and my old place for perhaps the last time. I now realize that I have a special attachment to that place because I associate the 2 years that I spent there as the most formative and definitive years in making the person that I am today. More than all my childhood and more than all my college years. It's hard to explain why should such a seemingly nondescript place be associated with such importance. After all it was just an apartment!

Maybe this attachment has to do with the fact that during those 2 years I had the fortune of interacting with some exceedingly sharp people whom I have come to respect a lot. Their smartness isn't necessarily academic but has deeper origins. Wide ranging knowledge, a perpetually questioning attitude, varied interests, views in which nothing is sacrosanct, an almost artistic anarchy of disposition, passion of some form or the other, and sustained intelligence. I believe that this set of people was special and that I would have been at a loss had I been almost anywhere else during my grad studies. For all my cynicism and, as MV never tires to impress upon me, elitism, for all the disconnect that I now feel with conventional social expectations, I do believe that I have learned to derive pleasure from things which have a more personal, more individual, and more innocent origin - and I would not trade it for anything.

More than just meeting such intelligent people I associate the place with being a roller-coaster of an emotional ride. Some windowed lights which never really extinguished, scattered shards of promises, caffeinated memories, a slowly swinging gaze into nothingness, surreal stories with abrupt endings, hope in the glass and aural disappointment, full moon and cloudy skies. Periodic taps on the plastic table, phantom impressions on the grass, cold touch of iron and rustle of concrete, a melange of academic woes, the reassuring release of a single shot, some sketches half sketched, and some stories half told.

I entered the place for the last time today and was instantly aware of its distinctive, although extremely faint, smell. And the past came rushing back to me - in flashes, more vivid, more immediate, more real than reality itself. The present had been deformed, disintegrated, and dismantled to give way to the form of reality that I felt so nostalgic about. And I fit the missing pieces, very indulgently and very carefully, with nuggets from my recollections. That faint smell which I knew so well reminded me of a few lines by Proust:

'But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.'

Good luck K2. I had a good time :).