The emotion of abandon is exhilarating, a complete surrender to an experience powerful enough to extinguish all rival thoughts and feelings for a while. The feeling of being abandoned is something else, the emotion felt by someone who realizes that they have been discarded by someone seeking abandon somewhere else.
A person experiencing abandon will get over their fling soon enough. For a person who has been left behind, however, the abandonment never ends.
To feel abandoned is to understand, without warning, an imbalance of attachment. While the abandoned long for those who have left, their abandoners are more interested in something or someone else, considering the abandoned to be insufficiently alluring… if they consider the abandoned at all.
The abandoned want to ask, “How could you just leave me like this?” They’ll most likely never get an answer. Their abandoners are far out of earshot, and even if they could hear the question, they would only give it a half-hearted response. Their attention is elsewhere. Something better came along.
It’s not just people who are abandoned, of course. Look for a photograph of abandonment online, and you’ll see mostly pictures of abandoned buildings and former possessions. That’s how being abandoned feels: To be treated like an object that has become worthless, like garbage.
We give up on the things we claim to love far more often than we like to admit, with a wake of deserted lovers, friends, communities, homes, dreams, and poems.
The poet W.H. Auden attributed to his colleague Paul Valery the idea that, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Then again, some people attribute this quote to Leonardo da Vinci. Perhaps neither man actually said it. Does that matter?
The idea behind this statement is that, despite the abstract concept of poems as perfectly conceived constructions of full artistic visions, poets are in fact only partial creators, taking their ideas only as far as their patience will permit. Every poem is an abandonment, an exorcised spirit, incomplete even in its death, trapped on a page that can be easily tucked away in pursuit of less pallid passions.
A similar sense of abandonment may be felt by parents who, having raised a child up to the age of maturity, leave their offspring at college, realizing that they never imparted all the skills and wisdom they should have, given all that time. To the parents, the young adult is little more than a baby grown large from repeated feedings, and they struggle to break the one rule at the foundation of every other rule of good parenting: Never abandon that baby of yours.
The new college student doesn’t feel abandoned, of course, but liberated. It is the parents who have been abandoned, by the spirit of youth, which has identified more lively partners to play with. In the rear view mirror as they drive away, they watch that spirit, incarnated in the body of their shared devotion, walk with a bounce in its step into a campus full of opportunities for non-academic abandon.
Some people, in the thrall of ruinenlust, will seek out abandoned places for the sake of their aesthetic roughness. To one who has truly been abandoned, however, such affectations may seem twee. Those who genuinely feel abandoned are not enraptured by the sensation, but left feeling utterly bereft of what they need most.
