Love

Dear Love, I cannot seem to find the words to express my complicated emotions to you. My heart is full with a heady mixture of surprise, joy and sadness…I had given up on Love all together, not out of cynicism, but over-idealism…perhaps they are one and the same. After what had transpired in my life, I decided that Love was best left alone, untainted by the boundaries of human emotions…on many nights I stayed awake, imagining that face in the dark…that face which I thought would look upon me through my days to come, would smile next to me in the mornings, weep in sweet remembrances in the twilight and beam with inexplicable contentment at night…the more I tried to shut the face off, the more it penetrated my consciousness…until I began to shiver and wonder if this ghastly ordeal would last forever… It was not like I was always in the depths of heartbreak…I still relished the occasional tasty meal, I still enjoyed the odd movie or two I watched…but embedded in the depths of my mind, a lingering fear always mingled with a leaden-sadness…the fear of loving again, the fear of letting go again, the fear of feeling again…in the middle of a busy morning, I would suddenly be assaulted by a happy memory from the past…and the silent joy which threatened to creep up on me was always suppressed by the wrench of reality… I decided to harden my heart…to not try too hard to figure things out…to live life in the manner of the mundane, of the routine, to relinquish thoughts of emotional investment…to re-invent myself through a journey inwards…to realise the permanence of impermanence, the absolute truth in the temporality of all things…to view everything as a cold, detached observer would, through the clinical lens of a micro-scope… And then I met you…and the interaction baffled me…and I realised that those desires which I had felt I had burnt long back, had resurrected themselves from the ashes of the past…and I felt them leaping like flames, urging me to rekindle within me the capacity to feel, the capacity to love…when I first grappled with loss, I felt that Love itself had died…but now I realised that Love never dies…it is invincible, and it expands forever, way beyond our restricted understanding of the intensity of its Being…and that it reposes within us, seemingly dormant, waiting to erupt, oh the volcano of love, the eternal magma of emotion, which swirls around the depths of the collective consciousness of life. How did I re-discover Love through you? Was it the gush of warmth which flushed its way through me, every time we held hands? The absolute surrender of an unforgettable kiss? The relief surging through the veins, following the melting tension of a resolved argument? The immersion of our souls into one another, offering windows to explore mutual mind-scapes…feeling a certain way about you, which I can only and always feel about only you? Thank you dearest, because you have reassured me that Love holds the capacity to outlive human relationships, and has great resolve to let people swim in its waters.