I Love us!

No one, just no one in this world can deny looking for love. When we are born, we look for mother’s love. When we grow up we seek the peers’ love. When we step into teens we start looking for cross-gender love. Well it’s too categorical on my behalf, because some of us start seeking that cross-gender love a lot earlier!

It doesn’t matter what kind of love we seek, the important thing is that we keep looking for it from day one to the moment we take our last breathe. We always boost of being the lucky ones, who do succeed in finding that love. We sing songs, write poems, whistle and even dance when we get the faintest of hints of our success in finding the most heavenly of feelings called love. But wait a minute is it a feeling, or an emotion, or rather still just a thought, this thing that we call love?

For some of us love is a suffering. Oh yeah like for Tanya, who loved to suffer, who loved it, when her love slipped around out of her hands, like a fresh fish. She used to say that love is something like a distant horizon, which comes close with every step you take, but comes closer to stay away. For her love was like a dream and as they say, it isn’t a dream that you can reach-out touch with your hands. She loved the agony of love. For her love was a source of pain.
Who is Tanya? Well she is a journalist, who uncovers socio-political events day in and day out for readers like you and me. She sees the ugliness of reality as a job. She encounters lies and deceit just as regularly as we see daylight. Her is a tough job, which brings reality inside-out and reality is not that sweet. Reality is black and white. There are no mid-tones or gradients in reality. Reality is like Nicolai Valuev, standing at above six and a half feet, with his gigantic fists, monstrous physique and a face that scares the hell out of the best of the boxers. And for Tanya this Valuev of reality delivers non-stop blows to her conscience, when she digs into the same socio-political, and not only, happenings that I just mentioned.
Tanya needs a world of her own, a world of fantasy, to keep her sane, because those blows can cause Alzheimer’s disease and render you dysfunctional in the ring of life. Her fantasy is love. She doesn’t want to touch it even when it comes close enough. For her love is the distant horizon and she wants to keep it that way. For her if it’s approachable it’s not love, because she does believe in the dream being unreachable. She enjoys the colors of fantasy, looking at that all vibrant love beyond the distant horizon.
But what has joy got to do with pain? What does love have to do with agony? Love is closeness and convergence and not distance and separation. Love results, whereas infatuation happens. Infatuation can spark love, but love never sparks infatuation. Infatuation is like childhood, which goes away just as fast as it comes, whereas love is like character, which shapes and grows; either you have it or you don't. Infatuation is a spark, love is the fire, which gives you warmth, light and relaxation. Infatuation makes you flirt, love makes you understand. Love has a personality of its own. It constitutes of feelings and emotions and understandings and giving and takings, soothing and healing, joy and freedom, content and expression, trust and faith, black and white with all of the intermediate gradient.
For Tanya it was all a different ball game. When she felt the love coming closer she lost interest in it. Vadim loved her and expressed his love for her in words and action. He could go to the space program to pluck a star for her and she knew it. That's why she didn't love him. She enjoyed the pleasure of knowing that he was all in love with her, but for her it was nothing more than 50 carat diamond that you can wear around your neck. She didn't love him, because she didn't have to run after him downwards on an upwards escalator. He was there for her whenever she wanted. He could give her all his love, but with that he took away the sweet pain of being unable to reach out and touch the closest of stars. She wanted him to be a mystery, to be a prince riding a unicorn, but he had a Peugeot. She wanted to sacrifice herself for him, but he had other designs.
She played with him and he allowed her to do so. She never liked playing with him, but he never understood that she wanted him to restrict her in those games. He was head over heels in love with her, but she wanted him to be the unreachable love, the distant horizon, the far off star, the genie out of the fairy tales, the scent that can be smelled or felt but never seen or touched, the feeling that never finds expression, but he was too available and too reachable. He had his love on a platter and feelings in his words and deeds.
Tanya never infatuated me. So without the spark there could be no fire. But she probably was infatuated or had that Olympic fire of love that needs no spark. It was the fire that was burning inside of her, so she directed it towards me. I never flirted with her, I talked to her. I never gave her those “give it to me baby” looks, I always looked up to her. She was a fine person, with versatile interests and knowledge and information, but meeting her and talking to her, only my brain tickled. It never got further than that. But she didn't know and I never brought it up. She gave it time, for me to come up with the topic, but she probably didn't know that I had no thesis with her. She waited and waited and along the way some times she spelled some falling in love type of lines, but I never gave much head to it. I left it to her intellect to decipher my admiration for her as a person and the end of line at that, but as it always happens, her intellect had given in to emotions before I could even get a hint of it.
Her bringing up of the subject of inter-gender relation of love and my closed ear to it in fact aroused her, in an emotional way. My staying at a distance solidified her urge and she started to draw the unicorn for me. I liked her, but she wanted the heat of love. I admired her, but she wanted me to adore her. I was close, but far away and she could not touch me as she could not touch the distant horizon and that made her fall deeper and deeper in love with me.
She held out for quite some time, trying one way or the other to instigate me into turning the flow of my emotions and feelings towards her, but her heart refused to understand that I could not irrigate the barren land of her mystical love, because I did not have the spring of love initiating out of the land of infatuation. She didn't know that my river of love started with the spring of infatuation. She kept throwing odd lines to make me understand and to react to her love, but I let all her attempts slip away as a hot knife through the butter; which leaves a mark, but heals as soon as the heat fades away.
And then the time came when she could not hold it back any more. She came up straight on me and said that she loved me. I heard that and said: “OK”. My response was meant to make her understand that her loving me was good enough to be OK for me and nothing more. But her failed intellect and over flooded with emotions heart perceived my words in a different way. She thought that I probably needed more time and she could give me more time and gain more time for herself to enjoy the agony of unanswered love.
Every time that she expressed her love for me and each of those times when I took it as the expression of her freedom of speech only, the pain caused by the cold wind of my response aired the fire in her heart. Her dream was coming to life. She was there, I was there, I was so close, but just a nick too far for her to touch the inside of me. I was like a dress in a store window, which fits you and you have the resources to buy it, but you can't get to touch it because the store is closed for the weekend and the glass keeps you apart. She was ready to wait for the weekend to turn into a Monday, but she never knew that my store was for members only and even on a Monday morning she couldn't get in, because she never had that card of infatuation to show at the entrance.
Understanding the helplessness of her situation I started telling her that I liked her as a person and nothing more. I told her that for me love had to be comforting. That I did not believe in conflict of interests to become common grounds. She said that love was pain , I said that love was joy. She said that I would understand, once I open up my receivers, but I told her that I had understood that love had nothing to do with agony. We were so different that we couldn't even agree to disagree.
Then one day, Tanya, me and a couple of other friends were sitting at our usual table at the coffee shop, when she entered and took a seat on the neighbouring table, right in front of me. I looked at her, looking at me or probably looking at all of us. And then I took a second look at her and the flint of her beautiful eyes gave out a spark of infatuation. I took my eyes away, because I had other things on my mind and I didn't want to get infatuated. But the spark had worked.
My heart started pounding and I knew it was coming; that practically blocked out heart throbbing feeling called infatuation. But I wasn't alone and trying to keep a lid on my vulnerability, I turned my head away from her, but my neck muscles committed treason and time and again my eyes caught hers and that spark started burning my heart.
For the next three days I passed all my time at the same coffee house, waiting for her to return there. I did not go up to her the first day and for the following three days I did nothing but regretted my ill decision making. I had no idea who she was and if she would not come back to that place I would had lost her for ever. But then on the third day, she came back.
I did not commit the same mistake again and that evening we sat together to have a couple of drinks and then went to dance it all out. By the morning the spark from the flint of her eyes had turned into a Zippo flame. We kept meeting every third or fourth day and then every second day and then every day and the fire kept growing stronger. It was not a fire that burns your house down. It was more of a fire in a fire place that warms your surroundings and gives you comfort. Our feelings kept getting warmer and warmer and we both enjoyed it. For us love was comforting, caring, caressing and sharing. It brought joy to our lives. It was like lying on the golden sands of a Pacific island beach. It was like wrapping up in a blanket on a cold and windy night. It was a dream come true and a moon walk.
The spark turned into fire and with time we started building our home around that fire. We did not sacrifice, we shared. We shared each other’s thoughts and fears and tears.
We did not impose, we discussed. We talked about things that people avoid talking about in a relationship.
We did not restrict us, we permitted. We helped each other develop. We agreed to disagree, but we did not hide this, we exposed it.
Our love grew with the passage of time and slowly but steadily turned into a huge mansion around that initial flame. The flame is still burning and the mansion is warm. We have been together for many years now and with each passing day the warmth keeps on increasing and increasing. We were in love, when Tanya felt like jumping from the fourteenth floor to show her love for me and we are still in love when she has finally understood that gain does not always result from pain.
We are together, we are happy, we are in love and I love us!