‘But I don’t love you.’

                       ‘But I don’t love you.’ ‘That’s okay.’

I just read something beautiful on the Internet about how sure all of us are about love, and how we just can’t accept that the people who can’t or won’t love us, aren’t broken or incapable of emotions. This reminded me of a guy I dated. He couldn’t get himself to love me and I just kept thinking how unfortunate his existence was. ‘Unable to love me’. That used to exhaust me. I felt like a bunch of photons near a black hole. All I had and all I felt went into him, and nothing came back ever. I kept wondering why sometimes every thing is okay, except the fact that ‘they’ don’t love you back.

That’s our problem. All we have been taught about love is that it teaches us to be better people, makes us more tolerant and loving and how love must most certainly be complete only if we receive. It’s high time people talk about the importance of unrequited love to their kids and fairy tales learn to keep it real. Love can’t always be for the better. Love doesn’t mend, all the time. What about the kind of love that lets people drown themselves in bathtubs? What about the kind of love where people become the monsters inside their heads? Why is that not love? Why is any thing fucked up not love? Obsession. Rebound. Abuse. Why are we so afraid to agree that even love smothers souls, even though love is meant to repair?

If ‘they’ don’t love you back, it’s not a problem. It’s a situation. Sometimes, it doesn’t need mending. Sometimes, it is okay to not be loved back, because ‘they’ are people like you and me, and sometimes, we just mess it up and don’t fall for people like we’re supposed to. So if someone doesn’t love you back, don’t try to make them. They’re not a candle and you’re not a moth. You have wings. Fly away. Love and learn to leave it at that. Fulfillment lies not only in requisition but also in denial. The colors are different and yes, you’ll cry yourself to sleep for a week or two, but then, that’s that. Heal. Tragedy is beautiful, yes, but learn to know that sometimes, you’ve had your share.

‘Even love unreturned has its rainbow.’ 

Let it rain, human. Let it at least rain.

Hence, words.

I haven’t been able to write anything in a long time. Honestly, I’ve missed writing, and I hope it has missed me back too. When I write something, I keep typing furiously looking at the keypad of my laptop, trying in tiny efforts that get extinguished within the blink of an eye to convince myself that it is as good as writing with a pen and paper in hand. As I finish typing each word off, I realize it isn’t good enough.

It isn’t good enough because the words come easy here. It didn’t take me one complete second to write down the word ‘Love’, or two and a half seconds to etch the words ‘He repaired me.’ permanently onto paper. It didn’t take my hands the effort to glide over the rough paper and move along the curves of the alphabets. I didn’t have to lift my hands every time I wrote my ‘i’s’ to put the little dot on the top.

So I do realize that it’s a compromise. A big one indeed.

Writing down makes you realize the immensity of the sentiment that went behind in associating meanings to the words. If you look at it, at the end of the day, words on paper are ultimately representation of sounds that have come to mean something to us over the years. If you keep going back to the start, in the end, nothing would mean anything. No one knew what the word ‘meaning’ meant at the beginning of things. In the end, it is all a big oxymoron.

I’m talking about the importance of the words on paper. Where am I writing about it? Well, on my laptop. So I do realize that I’m a severe hypocrite.

But there is one thing I’ll always realize over and over again.

We needed to explain each other what we feel in our silences. Hence, words. We needed to know things other than silence, in order to truly recognize what silence really was at the beginning of things. Hence, words. We needed to remember over centuries how our souls communicate truly only in moments of absolute silence. Hence, words. We needed to understand someday that no matter how many words you write on paper, there is never going to be a complete translation of thoughts. Words never capture everything. We needed something to remind us that in the end, our only language is silence and everything else is just a charade. But for every truth to exist, there also must exist a lie. If there were no words, would we ever know what silence was. Hence, words.

I needed to do something about that feeling in my heart when he looked at me. I needed to give it some tangible form so that it could take the silence from my heart and put it safely in his. The only legitimate thing I could ever exchange was silence. But what do I trust my silence with? I can’t trust silence in the hands of silence. There are so many silences floating around him. What if he picked up the silence from some other person who doesn’t feel about him the way I do? That is why I entrusted my silence in something else. Something that distance could carry without attenuating sentiments beyond repair. Hence, words.