A landmine is designed to injure. To kill. It can lay dormant, for years, and sometimes even decades; under, on or near the ground. Landmine is a victim activated weapon. A landmine is deadly, taking after my heart; my love, a victim generated weapon. What your place is in this scheme of things, you wonder? Well, you are the ground on which my landmine lays.
Love is glorious but there is also glory in the pain that it brings; glory like no other. However, not everybody is cut out for it. If you were to invest time and effort in building your strength to become capable of bearing that very pain which would also be the end of you, know, that I wouldn’t be the one to stop you. I’d ask you instead to leap heart first, right into it.
No, I don’t promote self-destruction. Love doesn’t propagate endings. It leads you to the path of self-discovery and that is what I promote.
Tyler Knott Gregson once said, ‘Loving is scary, terrifying and you will tremble. Don’t ever let anyone tell you it’s not worth it’. For someone who hadn’t known love until sometime ago, I am not sure how much I would have agreed with Gregson. But now that I know of it, maybe more than my sane being would have preferred otherwise, I heartily and completely oblige.
‘I wonder how biology can explain the physical pain you feel in your chest when all you want to do is be with someone’. Dan Howell, let me know once and if you find out.
Love is as simple to understand as it is complex to live in. The act is self-sustaining. But I believe it is us human beings who create chaos amidst its serenity and beauty.
‘If love were something other than love, it would be a spill on the floor- how it ruins the carpet’. Karese Burrows’ fine words. Love is like that. It can become like that. Like that coffee mark on the table in the study which refuses to budge, simply refuses to wear and clean out. Then, with time, it becomes a part of the room, adding to the bigger picture. And one fine day, as you walk past that table in the study and notice the stain vanished you immediately begin to miss it, wondering who dared clean it out. That room isn’t the same to you anymore. There is something missing, something that is irreplaceable, because nothing could mimic the tonality and coloration of that old stain. Maybe that is why tales of first love, however plain or torrid, are such. First love is that spill on the floor that ruins the carpet.
Belonging to a generation that is claimed to be scared to express love, I wish for self no plain sailing. I want to relish the winsome smiles love cascades and let myself be engulfed in its tentacles, pain-stricken too.
‘I am deathly afraid of almosts. Of coming so very close to where I want to be in life that I can almost taste it, almost touch it; then falling just a little short’. Beau Taplin, ladies and gentlemen. I apologize beforehand in case I end up bursting your bubble but I believe that all of love is an almost. Because we are mortals and a forever isn’t in the cards for us, all our love, of all kinds, is an almost, and that is both sad and beautiful.
How unfortunate then that we choose more often than not, with our own selfishness, with our own stubbornness, with our own carelessness, to push away the ones that mean the most to us. To destroy any chance of love. With love that is an almost, we carry the power of choice, of our pathetic destruction and how morose it is that we indulge in this act of senseless stupidity of letting it go; we all have-we all do.
Who am I to know how much love we all have penned down for the each of us but I also don’t turn a blind eye to the possibility that some might have just that one singular, pristine and the most marvelous love of all set aside for them. In that case then, the loss of that love would be nothing short of a grotesque and tormented end of the heart and soul, but not the ultimate loss. Because you still exist and you get to or rather must, carry that love in you, and never let it extinguish.
‘The cruelest trick is that so often it takes surviving heartbreak and crippling loneliness to know that you can, in fact, survive heartbreak and crippling loneliness’. Yes. Tyler Knott Gregson strikes once again. Love is that which you must give yourself too and only then will you know what it is. Or maybe not even then.
'If I die tonight, I think I would like to come back as your morning coffee. Just as strong and just as necessary.'
Gregson, I believe, is only looking for another reason to touch your lips once again.