For the Unrequited Lovers!
Love is complicated.
It’s a universal experience that each person has their own definition for. And to sum it up in a few words is a nearly impossible task. Perhaps many, if not all of us have experienced in their lives this ‘one’ person. Now this person might have been someone we considered out of our league, or someone we had a unique chemistry or an on and off relationship with. But something about them was so distant or foreign for us that we could never find it in ourselves to call them ‘ours’.
It’s like this flighty butterfly. Dancing around from one flower to another, beautiful in color and with wings so very delicate. I remember children in the playground of the school. Some would run after it, some would be able to catch it but start crying when by touching the wings, it lost color and a rare few would just sit with their face cupped within their hands, looking at it with wonder and joy.
Such is the case with unrequited love too. It has its stages. The one where you chase this butterfly like person whom you very well know you can’t settle down with, some are able to pin that person down by their passion and get back in return a half hearted affection that consequently makes them lose their passion and feel poisoned by their own love for someone who’s incapable of providing them anything. In most cases though you would chase around. That chase might begin as fun and exciting at first but soon gets tiring when it dawns to you that you’re allowing unnecessary pain for a futile case.
But then there’s this stage case where you learn to adore the fluttering butterfly from afar. You recognize its patterns and colors. But you learn to see beyond as well. You notice the rest of its body beneath its wings. It becomes less whimsical for you. That can in its own be a slightly painful experience because we want to believe the one we are in love with is unique. It’s true that they are but so is everyone. The flowers around that butterfly, the blowing wind that helped her fly, the grass beneath and all other insects. You find that they are all unique. Something about love is universal. Our love for individual once reaching this stage or depth stretches out to the universal love.
For the lovers that are able to settle down might miss the transcendental experience of unrequited love. For in truth, all love is somehow unrequited in terms of the physical realm but on a universal level we are all connected by chords of love and light. And contentions between the lovers while struggling with the love as the capitalist world has established makes us farther from the true essence of a romantic connection. An unrequited affection can open portals for self exploration and redefining what love meant and what we thought it did. Love is not a conquest. It’s surrender.
