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Shards of My Naked Self... contd

by Chenab Guha
(Kolkata, West Bengal, India)

Page 2

Or is love a desire to be cherished, valued and not merely lusted over. To me now it seems, love is merely wishing someone to bathe your wounds without flinching, to brave your deepest scars, to see you bleeding and to still find you beautiful. Love is someone kissing your lips and in the process kissing your heart. Love is someone telling you, you are magnificent even when you are in sweats and your hair is not done. Love is a desire for someone to see you naked shifting in and out of insecurities, trauma and to still want to be with you. Love is more of an expectation than a practice. You never love without the desire to be loved back the same fierce way. Unrequited love is well just an overtly hyped concept to bury the promises that were never made to us - poor souls, alive. Love is reading a book, going on museum dates and to libraries, appreciating art in its rawest form, listening to ghazals on a stormy evening with a steaming cup of chai, eating loads of cake, drinking wine till your cheeks turn a blushing scarlet, meeting new people and ‘falling in love’ with a few just for the night, leaving the next day with or without a note, travelling to new places, crying a lot, laughing a lot and trying to ‘live’ for most part of the time.

Love is everything that makes you feel alive. The euphoria, the rush, the thrill, the fear, the wreck, the scars, the blood, the torture- that is love. But isn’t the habit, the comfort, the stability, the slow paced town life, ‘I want to stop looking and grow old with you even though there might be others better suited for me’, the ‘I was waiting for you to get home so we could ditch the party and watch friends together’, isn’t all of this love as well....I guess we’ll never know. So I think we’ll forever claim to love and be in love only as we’ve ever known this four lettered word to be. And that’s how we will live –searching for it, being hit by it, floating in it, and then stumbling along the way trying to be in it..some of us will find it easier to stay while some will find it easier to leave. That won’t mean people like us didn’t love, we did, maybe even more strongly so and we will immortalize you, carrying you in our hearts, the only way we have known to hold on to people and memories – through our words. You know you’ve kept your wounds open and fresh, not bandaged, letting it sting until it stings no more. When you tell yourself that a soulmate needn’t be a husband of 50 years, a soulmate might be a person you met in the park reading the same book as you were on the wet grass and you shared a passionate kiss with and then he had to leave and you knew you couldn’t ask him to stay so you just watched him putting on his shirt and buttoning his trousers as he walked out the door leaving you to wait for the partner who never could read your heart to come back home to have dinner together while hardly looking up from his plate and into your eyes.

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