On love

I have never explored love other than by flippantly looking at the confusing, often foolish concept of a happily ever-after in my poetry. If there’s one thing I know, love shouldn’t hurt. But it does because it is inextricably linked with a thing or a person. And it shouldn’t be. But then, if it isn’t, how is it possible that the object of your love, your intense passion, will know that he is one of a kind, that you love him because of him, and not because you have love in your heart, in your soul. If your love is One, if the way you love the important people in your life with the same passion that you love the tree, how will they know how much you love them? How will the tree know what your love means? Is this all-encompassing love a cowards theory for not taking risks, for not opening oneself to the exquisite pain of being hurt by the one you love? If love should not hurt, then you need to love everything and everyone the same way, equally. Because then you aren’t loving someone’s strength and their core, you’re loving the life force that runs through each of us ever created.

These days, having loved painfully, never having lost (except to death), it is this that I am after. Loving without liking. Loving without loving one thing or another. Loving in its anaesthetic entirety. But I fear, if I loved like that, then I’ll forgive anything – of myself first, and then of others. That I will always overlook broken promises and I will break them too. That despite knowing that I can’t be the most important thing in someone’s life, I’ll still want to be. I fear that the way I trust, like a waterfall which does not stop for a second, does not hesitate for a breath before crashing on the rocks below, will not change even though I know, little by little, the rocks are giving way and smoothening, eroding till there will be nothing left to crash on. And that one, day I too might be the rock that helplessly ceases to exist, leaving a void for the waterfall to move on to something else.  

For me, there’s only one way to love. With utter and complete abandon. Without brakes. Without ever thinking about the scars that I already wear. Proudly, gently, I might add. Without a thought to the break that will eventually come. I cannot think of another way. If you’ve been in a storm that has drenched you right down to your most intimate thought, if you’ve watched a feather falling without any control over its drift, if you’ve heard music that snatches your soul from you, that is so compelling it practically composed itself, then you’ll know what I love like. I don’t hold back, I am incapable of it. While I try and not project all that I feel on the object of my affection, I feel the pulse of that love day in and day out. I shine with it. I live with it. If anyone’s every thought me even minutely special, it is because of this love that I carry. It is that which shines through. It is that which makes me as vulnerable as the soft caterpillar that I can crush before I finish saying caterpillar. I cannot be untrue to myself and love less. Or love differently. Anything else but the way I do it would be a travesty of the one emotion that I, in my infinite smallness, am utterly incapable of understanding but more than capable of living, breathing and feeling.

Can you take that love, my reader? Or would it suffocate you because you can’t reciprocate? Because, you see, that is my tragedy. Even as I love, even as I swear that I won’t ask for it, what I want – and as I say this, I give you the tenderest part of who I am – I want some of it back. I know, really know, that you can’t give me what I give you, because you are not me. But I want what is a bit of that core of you. I want that love that you treasure in your heart, the love that has no source but your own very soul; I want just a whiff of it, and if you are more than special, I want more than a whiff of it. But get it I must. Or else my love turns over, and hurts. And love, I realise, should not hurt.