One-dimensional Love
When you fall for someone, keep your love for them as one-dimensional as possible. Please allow me to explain.
Share to them songs you get drunk to, but never send them the songs that are much more than just songs to you. You know, songs that you like because you had secretly been in love with the artist back then, because of the coy breeze that quietly tickled the nape of your neck during the summer vacation in a faraway town, because those songs made you miss a person you haven’t met yet. For, if you do share them, then all those beautiful, precious memories would scurry into the void and you will forever associate them to the memory of the smile that leaked through their lips when you watched them listen to the songs for the first time. And God forbid, never hand them just one earbud, lest you notice the shape of their left ear, and fall in love with it.
Travel around the world with them. Take them to places you had always wanted to visit, but never could. Go sky diving, scuba diving, and rock climbing with them because when they’re beside you, the idea of death seems a little less terrifying. But never stop by to watch a sunset together. That would ruin everything. And don’t ever visit your hometown with them, lest they would catch the strange stench of nostalgia on you, and would never want to kiss you again.
Kiss them hard, hold them tight and make love to them every night, but never show them the scars on your heart when the first sun rays filter in through the gap in the curtains, for you might end up telling everything that has ever broken your heart. Also, never let them wear your shirt or tie your scarf around their neck that is still wet with your kisses, lest you lay in bed, clutching that unchaste fabric and inhaling their smell, through the rest of the lonely day.
Simply put, treat them as your lover and just that. Don’t make them your friend, confidant, mentor, role model, 3 am partner, yoga partner, your favourite person in the whole world.
Whoever said that the one you love should be your everything? What’s with the obsession of giving too many roles and privileges to that one person simply because there are very few people and too much space in your life.
You tell them too much, you let them in too deep, you make your love as multi-dimensional as possible because you think they would never leave you. But they leave you eventually. Hell, they leave you right after you have finally forced your ever-paranoid mind into believing that they are going to stick around after all. After they have gone, you would realize you have not lost just a lover, but everything. Everything that they had been to you, everything that you had let them be.
So yeah, do everything within your capacity to keep it one-dimensional. Now, the innocent, guileless ones might think I’m writing this because of the bitter experiences I’ve been through and warning you against those experiences, but the cynical ones might probably wonder if I had witnessed and held in my heart the all-encompassing, overwhelming, multi-dimensional love, that puts every other feeling in the universe to shame and being the selfish being I am, I wouldn’t let any other soul experience the sheer splendour of the breath-taking, heart-wrenching beauty of that overpowering massivity.
Well, I have to admit that neither of the groups is entirely wrong.
But now, as I am trying to wrap this up, I would have to confess that, deep down, I want you all to ignore every piece of advice I just mentioned here and toss caution to the wind. Let your acts of love swallow even the infinitesimal scraps of doubt. You get to experience love in the most real sense only once — you know, the crazy, passionate, I-don’t-give-a-damn-about-the-rest-of-the- world kind of love. Give it your best shot.
To love is to rebel. To love is to take the plunge despite the fear.
Originally published on my blog
