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Premise of an Eternal Awakening
I've never been in love with someone for the longest time, crazily enough, even in such a connected world. Seems rare growing up in a generation polarized with romcoms, that you don't feel the urge to develop any emotions towards the other half of humanity. I have been such a kid since childhood. Never seeking comfort in conformity. Always challenging the status quo. Investing time in what my peers were never cared to fathom about instead of the pursuit of love like most. I never looked at love the way it's supposed to. Just mere attraction waiting to be escalated if your heart wanted to. Nothing more than that, at least not to the level of spending a day dreaming about fancies. Consequently I did not find it the way it was supposed to be. It was in other forms for sure, love for music, love for art, poetry. You name the form and my artistic instincts will pour my heart out of appreciations. But never was it for a person in the strictest sense. Never did my eyes light up like how the rays of a million stars would brighten up the universe. My heart never pumped at the thought of seeing the beauty that someone has to offer.
You might argue I'm maybe wired different, that my mind never allowed me to accept my feelings for someone. That Sheldon Cooper does exist in real life and his worldly projection is what I'm merely. At least a lot of people in school would've taken this bet anyday. But just like The Big Bang Universe offered Amy, life had different plans for me. It took its own sweet time, but surprisingly enough, it did land me poles apart from who I was. When I saw How I met Your Mother for the first time, I lacked the emotional empathy to realize the beauty of romanticisation of signs from The Universe. Having a love story with symbols and signals scattered at every step of your path, who'd want that anyways. As fate would have it though, four years later, the same me cried, when he would hear Ted's Time Travellers' Speech, fully letting out his emotional vulnerability. It was a sign of growth, that I no longer was afraid to give myself away. However, like they say, fiction's fiction. What good would it do if I could not feel it.
That is exactly when You came into the picture. You opened my eyes to what love really felt like. What it feels to have your pupils dilate at the sight of someone special. How your heart can play a rhythmic magic to keep you fully alive in the moment. Ohh and does it play the rhythm out. Counting odd time signatures is not even fractionally satisfactory. You would not get the reference. A progressive metalhead and his bag of treasures. I never expected in my wildest dreams that I would one day be longing for a connection with someone, so deep and profound, that my heart would beat in memory of them. It was never me, but isn't it beautiful to finally be that person.
It's been a year since I wrote till this point, and it still feels beautiful to read it out loud. In my arguably ephemeral tryst with love, I've felt a ton honestly. Even though the journey has been bittersweet, the highlight of it all is the appreciation of pure and virgin love. Trust me, no single person who'd have known me, even genuinely close, would have expected me to write these words. This is what makes it all the more fascinating.
Love is one of the most profound and strongest feelings a human being can feel. It empowers, heals and brings in the highest order of resilience. It can move worlds in ways no other universal force can.
In a letter that has come to become famous, Einstein wrote to his daughter,
"There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others, and is even behind any phenomenon operating in the universe and has not yet been identified by us.
This universal force is LOVE."
You know the place love has in the human condition when one of the brightest minds in human history says this.
It's been a journey, a really long one, to get me to become the person I am today, and I would not trade the world for the realizations I've had to lead me to become this person. From memorizing civics in school without understanding the point of doing it even remotely, to having the heart to appreciate and feel Pablo Neruda's words (still a long way to go but hey, baby steps), it's been a journey that makes me feel alive. A lot had to contribute to this. The series I've watched, the lines I've felt, music I've played and of course, goes without saying, the letters and words I've read in the very place this piece has come to call home. Everything had a role to play, of course counting everything other than You. It's funny how as I type these words, all I can think of is about my younger self, completely oblivious to anything remotely close to this. No one who knows me would vouch for me writing something like this, least of all Your younger self. Yet here I am, the person I never really knew I wanted to become.
The dichotomy though is that love is this wonderful thing that empowers and energizes you, yet it also makes you do anything for your person, even at the cost of destroying yourself. It's way too strong for that. To borrow from my already referenced, self proclaimed best TV series on the theme of love, Ted Mosby said,
"If you’re looking for the word that means caring about someone beyond all rationality and wanting them to have everything they want, no matter how much it destroys you, it's love."
You keep fighting, even if the world rolls its eyes on you and calls you crazy. Because it was never meant to be understood by the rational mind. It was never to be formalized and studied and hacked. It was always meant to be felt and realized, how strong a force it is when it moves humans.
A pragmatic would read these words and call me crazy. But that's exactly where the fallacy lies. You're doing it all wrong if you're merely reading these words. You need to feel them. You need to bleed every word and crystallize the emotion deep within you. The day that happens, this entire post will shed new light to an awakening, to discovery of a newer self, making one feel like reaching the tip of Maslow's Hierarchy, even if momentarily. That day would be an inflexion point in a pragmatic's life. That would be the day when selflessness will be the most natural intrinsic state of mind, when sacrificing everything for your person will feel worthy, when their life will become more important than yours, when their success will light you up irrespective of any low in life and in their smile will lie your salvation.
Live that day my pragmatic, live that moment, and then let's debate on how crazy we all are. The kind of crazy that feels beautiful and pure at its very core. The kind of crazy worth dying for. The kind of crazy that will echo through the depths of time, for all of eternity.
Life's given me love of the purest form along with heartache in equal proportions, and while it's easy to diss on love especially as I write this post, that would be a terrible disservice to one of mankind's most beautiful evolution. Staying true to my basic constitution, which I try to believe is being a hopeless romantic, I genuinely wish every human being finds true love, and feel the magic as it is reciprocated.
Life may be hard at times, but the silver lining is always there. The Universe is always trying to show you the way and every moment spent living life is a moment closer to finding the person meant for you. Things will eventually pan out if they have to, and they will with the right person.
I raved a lot about love, and wrote about my awakening. Yet nothing would be complete without the words I'm about to say. I just want to take a final moment to show gratitude for everything this blog has given me. It started a journey for me that I never contemplated I was capable of walking. Every word here comes from a person who had been hidden inside of me all these years, and magically a series of triggers and realizations, stemming from reading and rereading old letters, brought that person out. The Universe brought this to me, for me to be able to find how capable I am of love, and I cannot be more grateful for it.
Words move, they make you feel and they keep you true to yourself. The theme of home cannot read any more justified, as I borrow from it and feel every word one more time.
"Words help me feel when people can't. Words teach me when knowledge doesn't. Words, they help me stay true to myself, when faith fails.
I sit down, and I type one word after another, until it's done. It's that easy, and it's that hard.
It is darkness and it is sunlight, all at once."
To the one whose small things remind me why I fell for them,
to the one who is impossible to find,
to the one I had all of, then most of them, some and now none of them:
You must know that I do not love and that I love you, because everything alive has its two sides; a word is one wing of the silence, fire has its cold half.
I love you in order to begin to love you, to start infinity again and never to stop loving you: that is why I do not love you yet.
I love you, and I do not love you, as if I held keys in my hand to a future of joy– a wretched, muddled fate–
My love has two lives, in order to love you that’s why I love you when I do not love you, and also why I love you when I do.