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"Bear with me as I seem to go in circles…."

Sophia Weinstein's picture

When I read sara.gladwin's first sentence to her post "bear with me as I seem to go in circles" it brought me to the relationship between Piya and Fokir, and the full-circledness of their time together. They meet when he saves her from the water, a mysterious sort of water that difracts light every which way. She loses her sense of which way is up, but is Fokir guides her to the surface. In the end they are both trapped in a powerful, uncontrollable water, in which saving Piya from it is the last thing Fokir does. The story is beautiful, but I can't help but feel a bit cheated. I know that Piya and Fokir's language barriers did not cut off their connections with each other, but the language barrier kept me from ever seeing and understanding Fokir. We see how much Piya has gotten from her relationship with Fokir: he saves her life, guides her to her dolphins, saves her again, and again. We never see what Fokir has 'gotten' from their relationship. All it seems is that Piya created trouble in his relationship with his wife and family, promted him to put himself in dangerous situations, and led him to give his own life in order to save her. I try to reach for understanding of Fokir's side of the story, but I find myself going back in circles through the stories of other people. I will never know, but it is all I want to know! But then again, that is what life is. We reach out and make connections with people to try to understand the world, the minds, the thoughts, feelings, and emotions that exist beyond our own minds, but we will never know the story. Piya will never, and we will never, understand what it is like to be Fokir, or to see what his relationship with Piya was to him.