Is It Love?

Reading time - 3 min 22 sec 

Let think something beautiful.

You are at a vacation to an isolated beach. Ostentatiously gorgeous cliffs all around. Spending all day in wonder-gazing, now you’re relaxing swinging in a hammock. A starry night, clear sky. Sea is humming its shore through ascend and descend of calm water spreading all the moonlight on the sand. Disconnected from the accustomed world, every nerve sense ease. To feel even lighter, you step into the water which your body senses to be at normal temperature though shivering you at first. Devoured in the thoughts, something catches your mind. Eyes closed, darkness around, you floating in now nowhere. Gradually water surrounding you starts raising. Waves sway you in divine harmony. Time, place, world are just oblivion thoughts now.

You envisage all the scenarios with that thing or person either possible or not. When you’re at a state where words like exhilaration and ecstasy seem too insufficient to express what you are experiencing, someone shouts from the shore repeatedly. HEY, HEY, LISTEN, HERE.

If you wonder who the hell came in between this all then FYI, this voice is mine. Just to bring you back here if you’ve got distracted to that mystical place. Now imagine another situation.

‘I’ll beat you until you look like a maniac bitch if I ever see you again with those of your friends. Bloody Slut.’ The girl who is being called with this adjective, couldn’t resist gushing of the tears while she lamented. Clutching her wrist with a force that will leave marks, the boy commanded not to make a scene in the public bus. Threatened with the Break-up cliché, the girl acquiesced with his terms and pleaded not to leave her rather she’d die. ‘I lo…love you, please don’t go’, she sobbed. Then bus halted abruptly and I stepped my feet at my destination.

Now, you would say, ’Sagar, what is the relation between these two anecdotes. First one slightly acceptable and second one utterly ordinary?’

If I talk about the second one first, that is what I saw recently while going back home. My public transport idea is blooming fruits as there is always something worthwhile in there. Plus, I can read there if I manage to get a seat. This young adult couple (I hope they would still be a couple) performed this drama while I was scanning through pages in golden light inside the bus.

I don’t want to talk sophisticatedly about how can that or any girl tolerate such behavior or self-love should be a priority among other attachments or she should walk out of this TOXIC relationship asap, et cetera. I know how one starts loving, if not all, then some actions, habits or characteristics of someone or something and how impossible it seems to detach oneself from those. It looks completely irrational to who are not in those circumstances. But neither hundreds of thousands of people dancing on deafening sound at any DJ concert nor you reading my day’s observation instead of bantering with your friends is rational.

Now, if I talk about the first story, that is what I conceive as love. Levitating you from the common grounds, divine, and liberating. I know this because if I do something or be in a situation and feel such diving floating in nowhere, I call it love. In a world full of myriad theories about love, I simplified what love is for me and that’s working so good so far.

Obviously, there are other ways to feel love too. And that is what I love about Love. The ways in which love can be described are similar to the number of stars in the sky. Uncountable. The couple who fights at one moment to tear each other apart and end up making out arduously have love between them and those two impatient heart-bearers who wait for days, months or maybe years to see each other, as well. But the kind of love (as that girl said) I saw in the bus while returning home, I couldn’t make sense of it. Love is non-sense, some say. That drama was non-sense too. But was it really love?

I have previously said that there can be respect without love, but love without respect doesn’t exist. I couldn’t see slightest of respect between that couple. You would also have heard something like ‘fight happens who have love in-between’ or ‘love grows with fight’. But is it that dominance and intrusion in the partner’s personal boundaries which we have started calling love?

Though I know the answer, I don’t want to be adamant lest I miss other possibilities. So whenever I see an instance which seems to be related with love, I ask myself ‘Is it Love?’

Most of the time, I couldn’t come to a concrete conclusion and often come up with a deeper and tougher question. But been confronted with another question, I smile, and at that moment, it doesn’t matter whether I got an answer. Because sometimes, it is not important to understand something, but to having it with you.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

James Baldwin

I took a long break between this blog post and the previous one and that was really irritating to not to be writing even so much going on in the mind. Weird experiments I do. Anyway,

How did you find this article? Did the words stir something inside you to think about Love? Drop your opinions in the comments box below as it would be really interesting to know your views in this regard.

Thank you. A lot of love.

Peace.

Photo by Everton Vila on Unsplash