Becoming a Genius of Loss

on the mastery of an important skill

It’s easy to avoid thinking of loss. Our daily schemes are bent towards acquisition. We look at the next thing we want, rather than what’s dropping away. But, much as we might become skilled in acquiring things, life is totally about losing everything. That shoe, that hair, this love. Leaving it all behind is really the only thing you absolutely must do.

It can be helpful to realize that you need to become a genius of loss. You need to become brilliant. You will become brilliant, at least along some narrow dimensions, in the course of losing things you thought essential, things which you believed you needed in order to be recognizably human. 

I have been a slow learner of this art, but I am improving. Letters, aspirations, places, brain cells—throwing them off becomes a smoother process as I age. And I am learning how every loss leads directly to another. 

This came up recently when I decided to stop talking to someone indefinitely. It wasn’t for lack of affection. Our contact with each other had been sweet and delightful, mostly. It was just for the sake of my sanity. In the end, together, we made an emotional/interpersonal contraption that was withering my existence. I wanted to sever the connection between our lives, such that I could stand there peacefully, peeling potatoes, and have it be about nothing else but the potatoes, and the room, where I was, only.

It was a good decision. I was happy with it in some parts of my body and mind. But not all of them. In my chest, there was a cigarette-y craving, a hard white ball of tension. It was like acid reflux that sang a sad song. It wasn’t even a desire for her precisely. It was a craving to dig at the scabs, to play among the memories of how things had gone awry between us. It was a compulsion to mentally torture myself with her shadow, imagine alternate scenarios, rinse my cuts with vodka, brush my teeth with rocks. 

For a week or so I let it chew away at me. Then, I realized my issue, as I stood naked in front of a tiny plastic fan in a big uncooled room in the height of summer. My loss was incomplete. I hadn’t been the genius of loss I wanted to be. There was something else besides her I needed to lose. I also needed to fully discard the idea that anyone could save me. The notion that someone else is the answer. The laughable idea is that, by being someone’s boyfriend, you can escape the questions of existence, of what virtues you might embody (then lose) before your own private decay.

This was the real source of the feeling in my chest. Losing it was the only way I could comfortably roam alone again in Montreal. So I did. I fixed it with my loving gaze until it melted. It oozed out of my midsection, leaving behind rainbow blood. With this new absence in me, I felt lighter and tastier, like a cleaned fish. Then I went for lunch and lost something else: the hope that the local dumpling place would be any good. Eating my bad dumplings, I felt bright and intense, coiled within my tender body. There was no escape, I thought, from this. Or, more precisely, there will be only one escape, which I’ve been slowly perpetrating this whole time. 

Now I’m moving on to losing other things. Currently what I’m working on losing is the assumption that my existence will go on forever. Sure, I know that my existence is finite. But how much do I really know it? Shallowly. I could go deeper. As I wait for the bus, I try to see the arrival of each moment as it’s shuffled up from the void, and then its departure as it’s subsequently returned.

That’s not the last thing of course. There’s a lot left on the agenda. For example, my drive for status, for exceptionality. Sure: it is not the desperate gnawing that it once was. Once I wanted everyone to chant my name in the street. Everyone at the party had to know of my gleaming resume. Now I am comfortable with only a few people chanting my name in the street. But objectively, still, my actions—the noises I make in the public square—are easier to explain if you posit some nagging desire for recognition. Eventually, I’ll have to make peace, fully, with the fact that I am a complete unknown and always will be. 

My muscle tissue will have to go. My energy. My smoothness, the relative slickness of my skin. I’ll throw all that away, just throw it in the garbage, along with this backpack I just got. The color in my eyes, too. Old eyes have a pallid intensity after something gets drained out of them, slowly, for decades, until they’re like marbles faded by the sun. Do marbles fade in the sun? That is a question that I will lose. I’ve already lost it, I’ve already lost interest. Now it is time to exhaust something else.

Currently, it would be possible for me to visit every country on earth. But on one fine day, when it’s too late, I’m going to start losing those possibilities. Lithuania is a shadowy semi-entity that looms in the distance, at present. When it becomes clear that I won’t go there, that part of my mental map will be shaded in permanently. I will lose fields and mountains, cities of millions, lovely Lithuanians that I will never have use for.

My separateness will of course be the final thing that goes. The loss of whatever separates me from the leaves and marble. My heat and movement. I get to lose all that until I’m as cool and quiet as a teacup. It will be crumbled, all the insulation that keeps my mercury drop of consciousness from the great ocean of silver. 

This could have a loveliness to it. The less I feel separate from other people, the more I lose my difference, the easier it is to love. Maybe this will, too, be true of the air, and the water, once I lose more of my distinctions: I could love it all like my own flesh. But, equally, perhaps none of this will feel anything like I imagine. Perhaps, though I hope for strength, I will be terrified. And then I will lose the illusion that I can know a single thing about the future crashing down on me. 

Sometimes I fear that this will challenge my losing abilities, despite the progress I’ve made. But then I am comforted by a joke my dad once told me a dozen times over several years. Young sailor says to old sailor: “I’m worried about being seasick.” Old sailor says, “don’t worry, you’ll be doing it.” This is an expertise that none of us can escape having. It masters itself, at one point or another. This is a game that I will win, whether or not I feel like playing. 

The opening paragraphs of this piece contain paraphrases of remarks by @miketyson and @meditationstuff.