A Lover's Sigh

The two hardest things to contemplate in life are failure and age, and those are one and the same. Perfection is the natural consequence of eternity; wait long enough, and anything will realize its potential. Coal becomes diamonds, sand becomes pearls, and apes become men. It’s simply not given to us, in one lifetime, to see those consummations, and so every failure becomes a reminder of death.

But the loss of love is a special kind of failure, I think. It’s a reminder that some consummations, no matter how devoutly wished for, never come, that some apes will never be men, not in all the world’s ages. What’s a monkey to think, who with a typewriter and eternity still can’t eke out Shakespeare? Such a love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Unrequited affections are like a disease of the mind. They give a touch to illusions, make bodies shiver, dreams bleed and loneliness to creak the stairs at midnight and terrorize us. There is nothing more painful than seeing someone you love loving someone else.

And yet, there is nothing more rewarding than seeing two people you love loving each other. In the end, if the one whom you love is happy with someone else, can we insist our love is more sacred than her affections? Sometimes, it makes sense to fail, for true love is giving all you have to someone you know you’re going to lose. He who has never experienced hurt cannot experience true love. Many have found the paradox that if one loves until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love. Khalil Gibran so beautifully put it, ‘Think not, you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

I also loved once; maybe love is too strong a word for my emotions then. Maybe it was the infatuation of an emotional teenager, maybe an adulation of a star struck boy, but in my heart, I believed it to be love. I wanted a perfect ending to my ‘love’ story. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Now if someone says, “I love you” to someone, I feel as though that person had a pistol pointed at his/her head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol-holder requires? “I love you, too.” I haven’t become skeptical about love, just circumspect.