OF LOVE

I never thought I was capable of love.

I am conniving… too political to seek only my own sustenance and too careful to make a move when the risks are high. Love was but a gamble for me. I am not your quintessential Mr Universe. I can’t sing or play an instrument or dance. Not good at any sports. I had always been clever, and I’m good at talking. But that hardly counts as face value.

Hence, love was a gamble…  there was too much to lose if you didn’t have the right cards.

Relationships were only perfect because breaking them was the archetypal way of completing them.

Yet… sometimes, over a bottle of wine and a gentle drizzle, one makes the mistake that he has been so avidly trying to avoid. The existence of the world shrinks to just one another person and every blank thought now becomes synonymous with what people would call, “the cupids touch”, but in reality, would be a bunch of chemicals befuddling your brain.

Yes, you fall in love.

But you don’t know it yet.

And how could you? You wouldn’t know where you are standing, because you have never been there. Well… you might have, but then you suppressed it with continuous doubts. When everything in your own life had more value to you than anything else in the world, you would hardly give a second thought to anything or anyone else.

It’s always been my life. My perspective. My thoughts… you cannot matter so much.

So… You take it as yet another fling. And you… well… fling along. You plot your moves. You play the game. Because that’s what it is to you… A game.

And I never lose…

And that fear… it spoils the hope. You need to be sure. You hesitate. You second-guess every flickering of the eyelid. Sometimes you imagine that the eyelid even flickered. But you take it slow because you are scared of rejection, and also because you are ignorant of your own emotions. You still think it’s a fling.

Or may be… you know, and you are too scared to lose…

You are desperate to win. You want it.

And in that compulsion, you overstep.

Emotions cannot be forced upon. And perhaps that is why for every Sherlock, there will be a Molly; for every Lily, there will be a Snape; and since I am using the shallowest of similes, every Naruto will have a Hinata.

Too shallow comparisons? But then, that’s me.

I think I have pretended too much already to seek something that has destroyed all that I have. But I could not help it. You never can. In retrospection, much could have been done differently. But to accept one’s faults and look beyond is not an easy task. There is much regret, and much to apologise for, but apologies tend to work best when they are uncoupled of expectations. Today, I don’t seek to change the bygone as much as I seek to live with it.

I smile, and I work. But I wish I could go to sleep and wake up with amnesia.

I never knew I was capable of loving. I didn’t know I was in love. But now that I know, it’s enlightening. These are not the lamentations of a loss as much as it is the pain of the new beginning. There is no clean slate. But if someone were to read mine, let it be known that even in my ignorance I loved you. And that remains unconditional… or it’s nothing.