love, etc. posted by imani , Saturday, September 20, 2008 at 5:29 PM, in Labels: freefall

My ride going to work today made me nauseous. I am not sure if it was the car freshener (that black colored pine tree dangling on the rear view mirror – I don’t know what scent was) or the medley of remixed novelty songs with the same haunting beat.
Anyway, after discovering that alien life may just thrive in my room, I decided to clean it this afternoon. My shift earlier ended at 10 am, I was home around 12 nn. I felt the urge of covering my books so I did…I don’t know why but it took me almost an hour. Maybe it’s the sweltering heat. Our thought process is ‘slower’ when it’s hot. Or perhaps it’s just me. I have always felt different…like I have a weird extra chromosome or something.
So I ended up going to bed around 5 pm. I had to wake up at 8:30 pm because my shift tonight starts at 10. That simply means that my brain matter is desiccated and that I am on my way to being completely, totally, utterly wasted. I’m just waiting for that moment to dawn.
Before I went to sleep I looked through my journals/date books from the last couple of years. I came across a quote by a genius named ‘Asoka.’ He said that ‘Love wounds in a way that does not let you live or die.’
Then I thought to myself: how concise and apt. And I thought of what he said some more, and realized: now I feel really horrible.
Love is a battlefield, a song from the 80’s proclaimed. Love is more than a battlefield. It is a freakin theatre of war. It sometimes is the reason for our nightmares, the reason why we dread going to sleep and waking up. Love is both a soft cushion and a mattress of daggers. Love can sometimes be so impossible and can also open all the plausibility for you. In short, it contradicts itself. It is its own worst enemy. It brings out the best and the worst in each of us. Love looks at us when everything slips into hysteria and laughs and stomps on us some more. Yet it is the same love that takes us out of the decay, the murk, the darkness, the halt.
Love is a lot like yin and yang. Positive cannot survive without the negative. They feed on each other, I suppose in that sense, to strike a balance. One finds perfection in its incompleteness.
I say love lasts longer than life (I actually wrote that line when I was in college, that was when I was head over heels in love with my seven year pseudo lover. After 5 or 6 years, the hopeless incurable romantic in me still would like to believe that one of love’s grandest qualities is that it’s enduring). Many of us have fumbled and tumbled for love and because of love. If you are reading this and you haven’t, do not worry for it is bound to happen.
And when it does, muster all the courage you have to take that leap of faith, to journey towards an unknown territory with neither beginning nor end.
Only the promise of pain and delight. The promise of death and life.