Unrequited love

Wikipedia describes unrequited love as the love that is not reciprocated, even though reciprocation is deeply desired. This can lead to feelings such as depression, anxiety, and mood swings such as swift changes between depression and euphoria.

There must hardly be anyone in this world that hasn’t fallen prey to this most innocent yet heartbreaking phenomenon. There are no frills. You fall for someone; they don’t love you back, the same way. There’s no escape. There’s no magic pill. In the rarest of cases, you can try your best to win their love. But even that tiny little ray of hope is blocked out when the object of your love begins to love someone else. The only thing that you can, and must do, is move on. But it is painful.

Someone has even said, ‘True love is the unrequited kind’ - a truly brilliant adage that must go to the Quotable Quotes next month. There is nothing as glorified in the mind as the love you had which was not reciprocated. In the free reign of one’s own thoughts and imagination, the love becomes the one love that did not get its due, the one love that you were meant to have, the one love that would be The One, and that you must now be left to live a life of loneliness, now that you don’t have it.

And there is nothing as amusing as these very same thoughts when you fall in love with another person. Which always happens. Well, almost. That is unless you are deluded enough to believe that there’s no one else in the world that fits the bill. Which you almost always are, immediately after realisation of unreciprocated affection :)

The question now is why. Why does this happen? I’ve always believed there is a reason for everything that happens. Not as in destiny. But more as in what happens now does have a meaningful impact on the future. And therefore one day we will have meaningful answers for the unexplainable that is happening now. Must we all go through this process so we value the love we do find one day? So we treasure what we have, because we know what it is like not to have it? Maybe. But it is painful. Maybe its nature’s way of avoiding potentially disastrous relationships. But that’s really not fair, is it? There’s heartbreak involved anyway! So what should happen? Maybe we should all be born stamped to love one person who is again born stamped to love just you. :) That is indeed utopia. Or maybe not. Nature has its mysterious ways of working out just right in the very end. If you wait till then, that is ;) …

Death - cleaned, commercialised and served hot!

I went to The Corner House the other day, the ice cream parlour that is a temple to many. I looked at the menu on display on the wall.

Death by Chocolate, it said.

What thought did that bring to my mind? Calories? Not being able to finish off the gigantic amount? But death? No. Fair enough.

I order a Chocolate Mousse with ice cream. I'm in the company of friends. Life goes on. And then I get a phone call. Somebody died. Not someone I'm close to, but someone I know, and the son of someone I know a little better. This was the 3rd call of death in a week, 2 of them people I knew reasonably well. Well, life does go on. I polish of the remains of my mousse and get up to leave. Then I see it again.

Death by chocolate.

Is it really alright to forget the real meaning of the word and use it so loosely? People joke about death all the time - from sudden realisation of impending doom ("I am so dead") to a friendly threat ("I'm going to kill you if anything goes wrong"). Death certainly has lost its meaning and gained a 'flavour' if I can say that. Little children are killing each other every five minutes with their toy guns. Video games are a league above. Gory, gruesome deaths are not uncommon.

Maybe it is a good thing. Joking about something helps lighten the burden that it brings. But yet, no matter how loosely you use the word, when death stares you in the face, its meaning becomes painfully clear.

I don't know why I wrote about this. Apologies to anyone if it depressed them. But it was something that lingered in the mind.