The Four-Letter Word

Love.

It spins your world around, turn it upside down inside out, making you feel delirious with ecstatic, blissful thoughts that changes everything around you into something out of a Meg Ryan movie – where things seem so much more romantic and meaningful than they really are. You think to yourselves, “From now on, this is how things are going to be.”

When Love turns against you, it changes into the other four letter word that you would wish could scream out loud, because you don’t believe that it manages to hurt you so excruciatingly. It’s heart wrenching, it’s heartbreaking and it’s a lot more painful than you’re prepared to admit or feel.

What is this thing that controls you so immensely, that it swells your heart and exposes it in a way that nothing else ever could and breaks it so mercilessly it bruises and leaves your heart raw and wounded?

Do we need it in the same way like we breathe air or are we better off without it? The risk that we take in involving it within our lives is much greater than anything else and it’s like gambling everything that we’ve got and hoping that it will give us the one priceless thing that we crave the most in life – happiness.

Those who have previously been in love before are usually taking guarded steps towards it and even though they feel it in their hearts, they are holding themselves back in from falling deeper than they are. Simply because of the fear of getting hurt again – the fear of the unknown, of what might or might not happen.

When it doesn’t work out – well, I wish it could have been dismissed as easily as when you lose a ten dollar bill – simply shrugging your shoulders and walk off. The truthful and agonizing fact is that when love betrays you it wounds you like nothing else. It immobilizes you from going back to being the same person you used to be – the fantastic person that the people around you keep telling you about. You die a little, thinking and wishing and hoping to God that things should have, could have and would have been better.

There are so many things that you so desperately want to believe that they shatter what you have ever believed in before. You want to make things better, you want to make things work – but Love comes and goes as it pleases. Like a thief in the middle of the night, it turns up when you’re at your most unprepared state and there is nothing you can do but giving in to it. When it leaves, it takes away your whole treasured sense of self.

So why do we let Love in? Can’t we just kick it out of the front door before it barges in into our lives and take control of everything?

Because when it comes to Love, we are risk-takers. Needing or not needing it, as much as we hate to admit it, it’s there and it will always be there. We can’t fight it, we can’t ignore it and no matter how much effort we’ve done in building up protective shells around us to prevent ourselves from it, it enters so silently in so many different, unthinkable ways that before we know it, we’re captured.

Love.

It’s beautiful. It’s crazy. It’s painful.

It’s life.

This piece is dedicated to those who have always been there when I need you the most. Whenever the neurotic side of me is lurking out, you will always remain hopeful and optimistic.