On Being In Love

Flaming June — Frederic Leighton

“They asked ‘Do you love her to death?’
I said “speak of her over my grave and watch how she brings me back to life”
― Mahmoud Darwish

He is sitting on his bed, the window screens are wide open, the sunlight is pouring in through the glass panes. The morning sun has risen, and he has risen too, but there is this empty feeling that takes over him. Even with all that light surrounding him, there is a darkness within that will never be enough for the light to conquer. A heavy weight lands on his shoulders, pushing him back into the comfort of his bed, into the tranquility and ignorance of sleep.

Then his phone rings, its just a notification, a ‘good morning’ message, and as if by a charm his gloomy morning actually becomes a ‘good’, in fact a great morning. Its not the message, or even the intention behind it, he probably receives tens of messages like that, and of course even though words do have a great impact on us, when its the right words from the right person, the very strength it gives off makes us feel infinite. And to have felt that ecstasy in life, at least once, is a boon.

And so he wakes up, with all traces of the emptiness that conjured him minutes ago abruptly disappearing, completely vanishing into the hidden caves beyond the horizons of his consciousness. He looks at himself in the mirror and smiles, he knew what was happening, he knew why he smiled for the first time in days.

The fact that his wallet was stolen, that he almost missed the deadline to submit the project work, that his higher official scolded him mercilessly for a small mistake he committed, and the disappointment that all along the flow of his life, he had never once experienced success, and that failure was his constant companion in every job he took up. Everything went away from his mind, all his pains and sorrows cured in one go. Even that feeling of something heavy stirring his soul and holding weight against the walls of his beating heart disappeared.

He knew his day started right then, the moment his phone rang. Because sometimes you don’t need God or some miracle to feel alive, all you need is a person who you know loves you.

“You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss

It might sound like a cliche, but when you are in love, your world truly does change, not literally, but the way you see the world around you changes, which makes you believe that the whole world itself has changed.

But as human beings who have lived and evolved for long enough to learn many aspects of life, we do know that everything has two sides to it, pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, peace and rage, even the moon has a dark side that haunts us more than the bright side. And love is of no exception, unfortunately.

To see people in love is beautiful, but to be in love, to go through all the ups and downs, pains and pleasures, heartbreaks and earthquakes, and hopefully the eventual peace of being with the one you love is something that requires more than the basic desire to love or to be loved. To fall in love is to endure, to understand and to adjust. But its not everyone’s cup of tea, though there is a trick for that too, and it lies in finding someone who is worth changing yourself for! In other words — the right person.

Someone whose smile vanishes your sadness, someone whose joy is of your concern, someone who will love you for all your imperfections and you do the same for them, in a way someone whose imperfections make them perfect for you.

Being in love does not and will never have a definite explanation, with the many kinds of hearts that fall in love, many kinds of loves takes birth too, someone born out of sheer loneliness, someone born out of pure passion, someone a result of childhood innocence, and someone out of physical desires, and at times love is born out of pure devotion too. Like the love of Qais for Laila.

And to write about love, one cannot expect to do justice to it through a single article, and one can never find a perfect definition to the ecstasy of that emotion, yet we the hopeless writer of yore keep trying…

For generations, many writers and poets have written on this subject, through books and poems that tell us the stories of pure romance or of a broken heart in search of love, at times even the stories of unfathomable obsessions. But one thing is common in all their stories of romances and it is Love.

“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you…I could walk through my garden forever.”
― Alfred Tennyson

And so you walk along the shores in the evening, waiting for the sunset knowing she will be doing the same, you sleep under the stars knowing she will be counting the falling stars too, you feel overwhelmed with the fact that you are living on the same land she is walking in and breathing the same air that surrounds her.

This is not the kind of love that is calculated, that is counted and accounted for, his is the hopeless kind of love, like the love of Selene for Endymion, Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, Kafka and Milena, Nabokov and Vera, and so on…

This is the kind of love that makes you believe your world revolves around the person you love, that their happiness makes you happy and your happiness makes them feel the same way, and that’s how it feels like when you’re waiting for love, when you are in love, but there’s an aftermath for everything, there’s an aftermath of love. That’s when life starts to play its cards, and demands from us to show our true self.

Yet again, this is not about what comes after, this is about what happens when you are in love, to be in love and to love someone more than you love yourself, not just to have someone to die for, but to have someone to live with. To be in love knowing you will get hurt from time to time and you will end up hurting them from time to time yet understanding our mistakes and changing ourselves, just so that when you wake up the next morning, you wake up next to them, and when you brush your teeth, you don't have to bother about whose brush it is, and when you see your shirts and sweatshirts missing from your wardrobe, you know who is wearing them.

The many promises of love vary from person to person, but then again there are some quirks that are poetically deep.

To be in the kind of love where you are sitting together in silence staring into the nothingness yet feel complete and alive, the kind of love where words are not the only way to communicate, where silences and subtle actions are understood mutually too.

And in this occasion of understanding love, here is my favorite poem on the subject…

One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII
By Pablo Neruda
Translated By Mark Eisner

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose
from the earth lives dimly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

From: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/

~ C. Madan

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