"You will lose someone you can't live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn't seal back up. And you come through. It's like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp."

~ Anne Lamott

This story Baarish Ban Jaana: Living In Her Memories is written in fond remembrance of my beloved friend Aadya or ,whom I lost on March 9,2021.

"Grief is never something you get over. You don't wake up one morning and say, 'I've conquered that; now I'm moving on.' It's something that walks beside you every day. And if you can learn how to manage it and honour the person that you miss, you can take something that is incredibly sad and have some form of positivity."

~ Terri Irwin

Dearest friend,

It has been two moths you left,still it feels like yesterday.

I can't say it has been easy learning to live without you. Heading into year three, I can say I have started to make real progress. I can talk about your death without crying. I can look people in the eye and tell them how you died. And now I finally feel like I can be honest with you. Okay, not with you per se, but I can be honest with myself about you.

I've come to terms with the fact that I will never see you again. It was incredibly difficult to reconcile my desire to see you again with my belief that there is no afterlife. I used to look for you everywhere, hoping that you were watching over me and sending me signs. 

With this acceptance, I am also trying to let go of the guilt from the promises I made and subsequently broke in the wAfter much internal struggle, I now believe you never would have asked me to do those things in the first place.
Deeper than that, I have been trying to absolve the guilt attached to the things I did to you when you were alive.  I am incredibly sorry that I was never as proud of myself as you were of me.

I can't be that wordsmith which you were, you played with words, sorry I can't. 

It pains me to admit that I think about you more now than I did when you were alive. I stare into your negative space and fear that one day I will go twenty-four hours without pausing to remember you. As the sound of your voice grows more distant, leaving parts of you behind seems inevietable.  

Selfishly, one of the worst realizations is that you are only the first of the big losses I will face in my life. It's not just our grandparents who look older these days: our parents no longer seem as invincible as they once did. I've also realized that you might not be the only friend who dies young or unexpectedly. And as cliché as it sounds, I've lost my sense of adolescent immortality. I know it could just as easily be me.

While it is frightening to think of what comes next, somehow, in your own way, you've prepared me for it. You were my first friend, my first eulogy, my first fan and my first critic (Be happy now, this was the way you liked to be remembered, I addressed you Aloo;). I think it would make you, the eternal optimist that you were, happy to know that your friendship keeps making me a better, stronger person. You showed me that I can function in the face of tragedy. You taught me the vocabulary of grief so I can comfort others when they need it. I never would have asked for it to be this way, but if this is what I can take from it, I will.

So, dearest friend, that's all I have to share for now. I'll raise a cake for your birthday this year, and, as always, I'll keep you in my thoughts.

Return if possible to your Muse, Aloo!!. 

No one calls me Muse to annoy me, no one calls me Aadi!!

With lots of love and respect

Yours Muse!!