Vennela passed away this Sunday. No one at home talks about it. There is no love here in my family, and if there is any that I don’t know of, it is never expressed honestly. Growing up, no one here made any efforts to educate me or my sister about social behaviours, how either of us express ourselves or move about, is but a patchwork-job of the different environments we’ve been put through. But there are nuances to human behaviour that are not taught, but inculcated. From what I know, that list comprises: love, joy, anger, envy/pride and pain. The deficient manifestation/development of these qualities in me does not cause me so much trouble in expressing myself to others, as in interpreting what other people express to me. On the subject of death and the loss of someone close, I used to believe that by keeping the matter in abeyance, by refusing to ponder on it, the pain can be delayed enough for it not to be felt at all. This was what I set out to do this time as well. But this time when memories of Vennela came banging on that resolve, there was nothing I could do to stop the mind from tearing up. I am not experiencing pain, as I thought I would, I feel an absence, an absence of companionship. An absence, that I know I can’t fill by myself at the moment. I do know that with time this moment will not weigh as heavily on me. But I’m unable to clearly comprehend what I will see/remember when I look back at this moment in retrospect. By absence of companionship, I do not mean to say that I don’t have loving friends, on that matter I must say, I have some great set of friends, friends that care and love and are affectionate. For that matter, I know that if I expressed myself to my parents, they too would try listen and understand, but, till this moment it never occurred to me, that this is how you deal with pain, that you face it, and accept it. Do not misunderstand me, when I say that there is no honest expression of love in this family, I don’t mean to sound harsh, neither do I hold any of it against my parents. The dynamic is such, and I know I cannot completely change it, all I am trying to do is to better understand it. But before today, I remember having consciously relegated such feelings to the back of my mind, reasoning that they were not worth the effort of dissection by reasoning, I still do not understand it, for it is no simple matter, a clear picture of the interdependence of human feelings, and their effects on social interactions is beyond me. Now that I’ve said what there is to say about it, almost all of it appears unnecessary to me. As in I could have carried on as before without a word, and maybe it would all have been the same.