LOVE OUTLIVES US ALL!
What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you come across the word love? Mother? Father? Sibling? Better half? Is that all?
Did it strike you that love by itself is YOU? By which I mean your very existence. I look around at the million homo-sapiens like me, few of them I love, few of them I’m inspired by, few of them I want to talk to, few of them I never want to lose, and few of them I never want to like. Hate.. It finally occurred to me that hate is hard to carry, heavy! So I dropped it down as it shattered to pieces.
I focus on love. When I have an option to be ANYTHING, why do I choose mediocrity? I see the clock tick. Tick, tick, tick. And I see an ambulance pass by. I realize, the breath I took just now was the last breath of someone else. And oh boy, it scared me! Not because of death, but because there is so much love left unsaid to people who really matter to me, what if I never had a chance to do it? What if I were in the ambulance?
My circle is small, I used to say. But it didn’t feel quite right now. Why not expand it? Why not bloom? Pondering over it, I walk down the lane and I smile at a stranger, she smiles back. Well, at least that minute of her day was made bright.
I fetch my phone out and call my grandma who’s been calling me home for ages. Memories of each day i spent with her as a kid surged in me. And the next minute, I book my train and switch the flight mode on my gadgets. Being offline does a lot, being out of reach makes you be in the present! And guess what? It makes you feel so content. You would realise the insignificance of the number of views, likes and comments on Snap chat, Instagram, Facebook and what not!
I walk into my grand’s place and nostalgia welcomes me. We cook, we chat, we cuddle, we play and as I leave her place with a heavy heart, she already awaits my next visit. I see LOVE there.
I come back to my own house, to my mom and dad, whom of late I’ve never been spending time with. I take a month’s off and I go back to being a child. I notice the wrinkles, grayed hair, strained movements and most importantly, I notice LOVE in them. I’m 26, but nevertheless, they see a kid in me. I realize nothing has changed over the years, nothing at all. ‘Ma, Appa’, I say, hiding my tears. ‘I love you.’ And they wrap themselves around me like they always do. I feel LOVE there.
Days passed, and I return to college, back to my buddies. Only this time, I evade gossip. I speak about stuff that cracks us all up, stuff we all feel good about, old memories that lit up our lives. Eventually, we became the most happiest bunch of all. I completed ‘unfinished business’, aka misunderstood conversations and meaningless tiffs, and I realized there’s good in EVERYBODY. My circle expanded, people in it got each other’s backs. Again, there was LOVE.
Life moved on, I graduated, I got to work. I avoided ego, with smiles and silence. I avoided jealousy, I avoided ‘unfinished business’ but hey! What I didn’t avoid was to socialize a bit, not through media but in person. So I told the girl at work that she was extremely talented, the guy at the shop that he was cute (wink, wink), people in my life that they were the best, i walked up to the girl who’s always been a quiz and said she’s always inspired me. My life changed, I grew by moments and memories and people started calling me ‘The magnet.’ Little did they know I was nothing without them. NOTHING AT ALL.
And I think about all this seated in my grandma’s room, a year after she passed away. With tears streaming down my eyes, I still feel her embrace, her touch and her scent. And I swear on God, I feel her presence right next to me. LOVE, my dear, outlives us all.
-Aishwarya Rao
