Every time I start writing something, I wonder if I should. “What is the point of it?” my inner self asks. But, of course, maybe there’s no inner self. But that’s for another day.
The first instance of love that you encountered was in your kindergarten. When you crushed on the guy who was rubbing his eyes while standing in the nook of your classroom. You didn’t know it was called a ‘crush’ until then. You looked at him, and it made you giggle and blush a little. Maybe love was supposed to look like it, you thought to yourself.
It was the early 2000s when you were sitting in the back seat of your tiny four-wheeler, carefully listening to that song playing on your car’s stereo. The music made you think about what falling in love would look like for you when you are of age.
When your seventh-grade boyfriend (lol) asked you out through a friend of a friend of a friend, you agreed to the idea of having someone you would fall for without thinking about what that would entail. When he broke up with you, you ended up listening to the same four songs your phone’s memory could handle then, trying to soak up the idea of your first heartbreak.
Years passed, and people changed. You kept falling in and out of love as the idea of love changed its shapes and forms. Now it wasn’t meeting at the end of your school’s corridor in lunch breaks. It wasn’t piling up recharge coupons under the newspaper of your book rack anymore.
It wasn’t typing ‘Don’t Reply’ messages because you used your mother’s phone to text. It wasn’t scribbling your name together on the last page of your notebook. It wasn’t saving up your pocket money for a month to be able to afford their favourite chocolate.
Love was the girl you found on Bumble. Love was being awake till 4 in the night, not just because you are an insomniac but also because you wanted to know the other person’s favourite colour. Love was the cab ride you shared with that stranger you met at the coffee shop.
Love changed its forms. It changed you. Love wasn’t all rosy. It wasn’t all romantic. It wasn’t all about having that one person for eternity. Love wasn’t fate. It was the effort. Love wasn’t promised. It was the will to keep them. Love wasn’t standing in the face of adversity. Sometimes, it was just crumbling as adversity stared right into your eyes.
Love was retracting into a cocoon while curling inside your blanket and bawling your eyes out because you were not on the same page. You never would be. Love turned into shifting boundaries, over and over and over again. Love became creating boundaries, once and for the time to come. Love wasn’t perfect. Love couldn’t stand the test of time. Sometimes, love did.
You never pictured love like this. But love was ugly. Love makes you want to hold on to itself while losing hold of yourself. Love was shutting your eyes in the middle of the night, convincing yourself that what you felt was not okay.
Love was talking to yourself for hours, thinking you were at peace and lashing out the very next day because you didn’t know what to do with the love that was within yourself when it wasn’t supposed to be. Love was wanting to take care but not being able to. Love was being taken care of, but not sure if you deserved it.
Love was respecting boundaries. Love was understanding. Love was the idea of not diluting the other forms of love because it existed in many forms. Love became acceptance. Love was hopelessness. Love was the coming back of hope. Love was platonic. Love realised how narrow and how vast it could be.
You would wake up to RD Burman and Sonu Nigam on the radio. You would jump out of bed to listen to Atif Aslam and Enrique on MTV. You transitioned to listening to Adele right before your school bus came. They told you that love looked like different things. This was one part of your world.
Love was a hush-hush word. Love was criminal. Love led to the neighbour’s daughter being married forcefully because she fell in love against her family’s wishes. Love led to your school senior being taken back to her hometown, for she fell in love with someone from a different religion.
Love made your college friend be estranged from her parents because how dare she fall in love? Love was lost when it had been found. Love was not allowed to be around. Love wasn’t loved if you found it in a person of different caste, class, gender, or religion.
Love was choosing between people you love. Love was choosing yourself. Love was, and love is.