The Worth of an Option

What do you need to recuperate from, after the death of a loved one? And, what does society offer you the luxury of?



Almost towards the end of Norwegian Wood, the main protagonist runs away into the hills to recover from the loss of a person with whom he shared a difficult relationship. 
We all lose people. People we love, people we care about, people we want to hold onto. And, sometimes we feel their worth, their importance, once there is no way they can walk back.
"The dead remain dead." 

When you lose someone and it triggers an unusual feeling in you, a confused state. A state which shouts at you, "You never cared about the existence of this person. Yet their departure, their ultimate absence is gnawing you from inside."
This is the loss of option. 
Now, you longer have that person.
Now, you can't muster up the courage to resurrect them back into your life. This death of an option is more palpable than the death of the person. This is how some people go away, their involvement in our lives, is categorically more important than them as a person!
Such a tragedy! It is!

Some people die early, some people die alone, some people don't die, only their worth as an option dies, as they were long dead much before their body succumbed. They were dead for the people they considered to be the most important people in their life. This is unfair. Is life fair?

Where there is an entrance, there is usually an exit

When you are someone like me, with a switch 'ON' button but no 'OFF' button, you are bound to gravitate towards lines by Murakami like 

“Where there is an entrance there is usually an exit. That’s the way things are made. Mailboxes, vacuum cleaners, zoos, salt shakers. Of course there are exceptions, Mousetraps, for instance.”

If I have to tell you the truth, I don't have any qualms about my obsessive personality. In the software parlance, I would like to term it as a feature not a bug. Of course, there are times you wish that there was a way out, the so called 'exit'. 

The art of distancing yourself from things at the perfect time is something which requires certain strand of cold-heartedness, which yours truly lacks. There are just quite a few times I have been able to say the perfect 'Good-Bye' with mathematical precision of a well-aimed projectile. Those incidents still haunt me more than I ever cared while executing my acts. 

Be it the quaint neighbourhood cafe, breakfast cereal, a new brew of tea, someone special...you get the drift? I have a bad habit of obsessing over them till I get a closure of sorts. As I don't practise moderation in the acts of heart, I drift apart from them too. Perhaps, that's my exit? No! It's more like death. Exit is something which starts another day, something like 'light at the end of the tunnel'. The way I part is more like a butcher bludgeoning an animal to death.

Few years back, Alpha & I were discussing about addiction. 
Alpha asked , "How to stop this habit of sipping diet coke?"
"Simple, order ~100 of them and finish them in 3 days" I replied
"Wow! Even I follow a similar plan to get off a bad habit, just do it so many times, you get bored of it. More like you overflow the process of quenching your cravings. Like capillary effect, it just adjusts the contact angle and no more of it overflows" added Alpha

And in the words of Haruki Murakami,
“All things should have both an entrance and an exit. That’s just the way it is.”