love – Page 19 – Hearts Still Care

What Lovers Do

Published on July 27, 2022July 29, 2022 by Harpreet Chhachhia7 Comments

You speak a different language.
Your world isn’t anything like mine.
You won’t let your loved ones know me –
And for you, all this works just fine.

You don’t understand my thoughts
And you are new to love’s fights;
You keep silent when you must speak
And you sleep through sleepless nights.

Our decisions made, you forget,
And most promises lie broken, too;
Yet I keep giving love chances
Because that is what lovers do.

My heart has been through hell,
It has been fooled by sharper minds;
Still it harbours love that doesn’t alter
When it alteration finds.

So here it bows again, before a man,
Who has much against his case,
And it stands scared before life,
Because it may again lose the race.

But damn, it hopes beyond hope,
With each rising of the sun,
That it wont be left bereft
By someone called the Kind One.

A Lover vs A Friend

Published on June 26, 2022July 18, 2024 by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

There’s a syntax that happens when people fall in love. Their friends feel like subordinate clauses. As it should happen when people fall in love, their lovers become a priority. Most friends feel alienated.

In the modern world, where the need for self worth is all consuming, the necessity for the Self to feel secure and by default the friendships one already has an extension to the Self, become paramount. The love relationship then becomes of second nature. Something that is breakable and by default is transitory and thus needs secondary attention.

However, when marriage is in the picture all the other priorities become less significant – to a degree and for a certain period of time. Because marriage involves society and other relationships. In a gay relationship, where marriage isn’t the be all and end all, the validity of love becomes subservient to time and other human equations. And in a country where there are no gay marriages, gay relationships become temporary even in the eyes of the gay vox populi.

Gay friends speak of the love between two queer people frivolously. There are aspersions to the validity of the love itself, considering the amount of sex that is available out there in the community. Hurrah, for the sex. But the point I try to make is that sex is often seen as the be all and end all of a love relationship. Most people forget about the word “love” itself.

I will be the first to admit that love is a complicated emotion. Understanding it is probably futile. Thus, one can only feel it and the abstraction that it creates is inexplicable. One of the reasons why it’s so easy to think of it as not worth the bother. Sex is simpler. Easier. And people who have not felt the abstraction can only equate it to what is practical and attainable.

This I find bothersome.

What one must remember is that romance doesn’t last. Love does. Sex may or may not last. Love does. There are no two ways about it. When one feels, and when one feels deeply, the emotion penetrates the tangible heart. It manifests therein like a living, breathing thing. And as the passion and the romance wanes, the friendships return to their own spaces. They may come in a bit singed, if they don’t understand what love is. And if they themselves have loved, the singe heals. Love finds its own grooves and alcoves.

If only friends understood this. Friends and lovers. Each have their own spaces. Their own gardens. Their own gazebos. In the same heart.