Love and loss

I was looking through old pictures yesterday and although I knew what to expect, I was still a bit taken aback. It is terrifying when you revisit your old life, via all these snapshots of the past. You see yourself smiling in the arms of men you don't even recognize anymore, you see clothes you forgot existed, people whose names you have forgotten. You see your collection of exes, exes of exes and exes of friends. And when I say exes, I don't just mean boyfriends: ex-friends, ex-flatmates, ex-important people who are important no more. I saw my millions of haircuts, my drunk self in birthday parties form what seems to be the previous century. I saw myself in houses I didn't even remember existed.

And all this makes me think about loss: it's so much a part of our lives yet every time it happens, every time we lose someone, we act as if it is the most outrageous thing in the world. It is painful, yes, but outrageous or rare, no! It happens all the time. People feature prominently in our lives for some time, they are the centre of our world and then they disappear.

Sometimes, they even disappear without leaving a trace - as if they never existed. Odd but true.