Leaving something behind

Leaving something behind

By Shailendree Wickrama Adittiya

Dogs mark their territory by urinating on them. Maybe not always with that intention, but those stains are evidence of ownership. We too are like dogs, we keep marking our territory. Only in a less raw manner. We instead stamp our names on what we own.

My room is strictly mine. Not just my name pinned to the door, or the paintings and drawing I have decorated my walls with. The room that was once someone else’s is now mine in the way my clothes are scattered about, my books crowd the room and how an assortment of items cling on to whatever space they find. When entering that room, you don’t just enter any bedroom, but my bedroom. And besides the emotional attachments I have to that room, there is also materialistic attachment.

We have somehow marked everything we own, clothes, books, shoes, places and even memories. We add things, we forget certain other things, and we make those memories ours.

Table and chairs in schools too have names carved into them. Even though you would use them for maybe a year, or just a day. Lovers carve their names within hearts on trees or walls when these marking will actually outlast the relationship.

I went to a temple recently, and found names of those who made donations on gates, walls, oil lamps and even Buddha statues. Books in libraries too have names and even dates, markings of ownership.

People too, we own, by adding a ‘my’ to their names. My mother, my father, my best friend extends to bands, music, movies and actors. We make all these things ours even though we have no real ownership of them. And do we take them away with us? Can we make them ours forever?

When Sri Lanka was hit by the tsunami in 2004, clothes were collected to send to the affected areas. My mother packed bags of clothes we no longer used. She also packed in these blue shorts my grandmother once bought me. They were no different from other shorts and they were not even a new pair. I loved that pair, but I was too big for it and rarely wore it. It only seemed right to give it away, but I never let her. I hid it away, because they were mine. Sadly I never wore them after that too.

A novel I quite enjoy reading spoke about these marks we leave behind, and how they are too often scars. There are marks and scars that we leave behind, unknown to us. Love, affection, kindness and so on, can be remembered generations from now. When people thank you for a good deed decades since that now forgotten gesture, it is not because you are asking to be remembered. It is because you are worth remembering.

Scars though, don’t deserve to be remembered. Certain marks too. Memory is a funny thing however, and remembers many things not worth remembering. Michael Jackson died a few years ago, and is still remembered. Princess Diana died more than a decade ago, still her name floats around. Shakespeare died centuries ago, his work though, is still widely read. Jesus Christ was a man of the very distant past and his words are still followed. We remember all these people who definitely left a mark behind, but we also remember the bag and the ugly. Thirty years of conflict, Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, Hitler and much more. These incidents and people left scars that are still remembered.

Not all these marks or scars last forever. People, mistakes, wrong doings are forgotten. Sadly, the forgiving part of the ‘forgive and forget’ concept is not as easy as the forgetting part, but we do easily forget to forgive.

Marks though, demand to be left behind. And in many ways, we too have this human need to leave them behind.