Of the loves

Neruda did it again. Flipping through the thin volume to distract myself from other pressing commitments, I fell in love with love, all over again. Who cannot, will not, after reading this:

I do not love you as if you were brine-rose, topaz,’
XVII From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’


I do not love you as if you were brine-rose, topaz,
or barbed carnations thrown off by the fire.
I love you as certain hidden things are loved,
secretly, between night and soul.

I love you like the flower-less plant
carrying inside itself the light of those flowers,
and, graced by your love, a fierce perfume
risen from earth, is alive, concealed in my flesh.

I love you without knowing how, whence, when.
I love you truly, without doubts, without pride,
I love you so, and know, no other way to love,

none but this mode of neither You nor I,
so close that your hand over my chest is my hand,
so close they are your eyes I shut when I sleep.



If you didn’t, if you don’t every time you read it, don’t tell it to me. To anyone. Just run through the taste of the poem in your mouth and you’ll know what you missed. Or are missing.

After 29 years of hopelessly falling through one maze or other, looking for the love that beckoned me, I have conceded to the realization that it was not ‘love’ in someone or something that I was seeking. It was ‘love’ itself; in its nameless-ephemeral existence. In its long and short, I love the whole ‘love’ deal. In my younger days, I would spend hours at random bus stops, refusing to rush into the ones which promised me to reach me to my destination, waiting for the knight in shinning amour to ride me away to the moon. In my waiting, never did I think that it was a figment of my own wrapped imagination. I genuinely believed in the moment. I genuinely believed in love. Not knowing what I meant by it. Not understanding what I felt with it. Or what I would do with it when it happened. All I knew I wanted to love.

With the growing-up-years, one acquires bitter-sweet skins. The accumulating age makes it difficult to shed these skins with the abandonment that one dances in the rain when is young and the outside world a hyperbolic space-ship reality. In my case, the bitterness of the skins prevailed. Even then, I did not give up on love. Only I lost out on love because the bitterness made it difficult for me to embrace love: love of myself, love of others, love for myself, love for others. In this phase, I loved with a vendetta. I sought the soft corners of love that the others had carefully folded in their satins and stained them. In some situations did not give up till the time I had torn those satins into shreds. No one lost anything except me. These people with the soft folds knew and felt love. And once you know that, you can tie together the loose ends with borrowed strings to spread your wings. I, me, myself in my self-induced reality derived moments of obscene pleasure or intense pain through these acts; both these emotions, I constantly evoked to seduce myself with the idea that I felt/knew/lived with love.

Little did I know then?

I am older. Though I still carry the bitter-sweet skins, they are breaking up. When I let myself cry aloud, I can taste the bitterness, sometimes even the sweetness. I cannot still say that I understand love in all its ways but at this moment, I am eager to learn; to let the loves emerge out of their swarms and take me by the nape and sling through my hair. I pay close attention to love these days. I look out from where I sit and watch a girl with cheap golden hair, melancholic songs and cigarette and imagine her loves. Her lives. Which one of the loves is she suffering? What is love, a question asked so often without ever reaching to an answer that it has almost become rhetorical. I have learnt about loves in many different corners through many half-baked conversations. But still I cannot say what love is. Not authoritatively.

Love in its most basic, primal sense evokes an intense physical sensation. This sensation makes one feel light-headed to weightless, sometimes when one is mourning the love it is an immense heaviness. But love when shared, consciously and deliberately, varies in its manifestations. It is the matter of how much you let yourself love and fear which decides whether you let your love your die an untimely death, whether you live with it as one lives with the routine of daily breakfast or whether one practices it. The practice of love is an entirely different universe than living with love. Loving, itself, another constellation.

I have lived with love and practice it religiously. I have stabbed loves even before they developed their fangs. But at this moment, in these white nights of my life, I have been propelled into that another constellation of just loving. Loving, revering, celebrating, Love, as it has never been done before. My love is no longer directed towards an end, a consequence, a name, some soul and flesh. In doing so, I am aware, I am isolating the constellation. I am the only one who counts the stars and wanders the way on dark nights. Or the mornings. But in doing so, I am allowing myself to love in ways I thought wasn’t possible. With these loves, come the fears, the anxieties, the loneliness, the desires, not for anything/anyone but for allowing all the pores in your self/your soul to receive the nectar of the loves. I am excavating myself from the depths of the dead seas in which I had let it languish. It is by no means an easy task. I am constantly confounded by me in its many avatars. I have the power to exercise the excuse that ‘it wasn’t myself at that moment’ but with no audience, no patient rum-soaked hearings, these sound jaded to me and on a closer look and feel, I can pull out the me standing behind the closet. There are times even when I don’t recognize myself but that is not so much because it’s not me but because I would like it to not be me. Such is the loves that have overtaken me at the moment that I even love that me. I am ready to forgive, myself. I cannot still contain others. But I have allowed myself to love the ones who hated me, hurt me, and hid me.

While driving down the streets or staring from up above, an odd sound, a strange name, a familiar sight makes me fall hopelessly in love. In moments as such either I walk the ways with the loves of the past or create new ones. With the loves of the past, I do not try to mend things, I don’t cry and plead, I just walk behind, swallow the taste of it in my mouth and let the sensation take over me. When the time comes, I let go of it. Not without a tear or a heaviness in the heart.

With the new ones, I begin at the beginning. I let myself be absorbed in the depths of contemplation and speculation that comes with it. I let myself smile incessantly and then, immediately, breakdown in inconsolable sobs. I let the love that holds me in that moment live beyond it’s life. Like an idea, I stretch the love to its extreme, to allow for it to have a life of its own. Sometimes it wavers off, attaches itself to a passing boy, on other occasions it stays with me, refusing to let go, announcing itself suddenly and demanding the whole of what I have to offer.

All in all, I just have a sensation, a sense to cherish to smoke with my cigarettes and sip with my rum on stark white nights. And the daylights.