may be it truly was love
2025-03-14 10:31
Status: completed-writing-pieces,
Tags: why-did-you-cry, first-love, love, love-after-love, emotions, journal
may-be-it-truly-was-love
26th October, 2021
Three years ago, this day, I had felt something I don’t really have a name for. For a long enough time I called it ‘love’. May be it truly was ‘love’.
It was the beginning of a major transformative chapter of my life. It was also the annihilation of a version of me that had reluctantly suppressed this feeling for 26 long years.
Honestly, I still don’t know if I should call it ‘love’ or not. May be it was ‘grief’ in reverse order. From head to toe, I was feeling something. What do you call it when happiness and anxiety is mixed up in equal proportions. Butterflies? I couldn’t concentrate on anything. Not even on what I was exactly feeling. Love??
Anyway chuck it.
NID Ahmedabad, Semester 1,
Zoom Call with 36 more participants.
That day, I had taken a moment to mute my online class. The lecture was about spacing and proximity. I switched my camera off as well. I opened my tiny white notebook and wrote down everything I was feeling. No editing, no word sequencing, just word by word, of everything that I exactly felt.
I don’t know how to even share it in short. So I will let the words do the speaking.
To quote it word by word, “As I am hearing about spacing and proximity, I am having a different zone of feelings about proximity and spacing. A lil bit of heavy breathing, with some extra pumped up heart. I know this feeling is something different; unique in its own way. Excited, anxious and hopeful in the same time. For the solace I crave, in the midst of the chaos.”
I wonder if I can truly call this chaos as love. Is love this chaotic?
<<There are other complex layers as well, the story of which I will have to skip in this piece of writing. What happens when a shared understanding of grief leads to an attachment beyond measure. What happens when that attachment turns into infatuation. What happens when that infatuation disguises itself as love. What happens when love disguises itself as grief. What happens when grief disguises itself as care. In this interconnected web of feelings, tear drops were the only way my body could process all of these. How do you fantasise and cry at the same time? How to feel sad and ecstatic at the same time? I still wonder why did I cry? I have found a few answers to this perpetual quest. Anyway that’s a story for another day. Ot’s difficult to summarise of what I felt in just a paragraph here. A book, someday. would do justice to put words to what I felt. I pray that I write the book someday.>>
Fast forward three years, today as I am talking with you, my heart doesn’t race that way. It’s calm. It’s at peace.
No pumped up heart.
No heavy breathing.
No chaos.
Oh where are the butterflies?
Lying down on this couch of my friends place in London I feel some kind of a peace. A relaxed nervous system with zero anxiety. No rush to predict what you are feeling. There is trust, an unspoken promise of sorts, beyond the spoken promises.
What I felt on 26th Oct 2021, perhaps, was love too; just a different kind of love.
Just like my school days love, where I would reach early in the morning to stand behind my crush during the morning prayers in the assembly.
Wasn’t that love?
May be it was! Eros or Agape, you decide!
26th October 2024,
Three years later, as I write this today with your beautiful eyes in the video call window hovering on the screen, I realised how far have I come. As Elif writes in Forty Rules of Love, “Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven't loved enough.”
What I feel today is perhaps also ‘love’, just a different kind of love.
Beautiful , calming and peaceful. Like a soft breeze in a lavender garden.
Sometimes I feel something, perhaps disbelief. A disbelief of something so beautiful existing. But as Darwish says, “And if happiness visits you again, do not remember its previous betrayal.. Enter into the happiness, and burst!"
Entering into happiness.
Till the last breathe,
I love you.