Love: Life's Only Salvation

By Snehasree Senthilkumar

Love. The word flung around carelessly to express even slight sensations of joy. The word slapped on tumultuous and lustful relationships, unbeknownst to the true weight it conveys. The word everyone uses, but nobody truly understands.

Nature has it ways of teaching us about human nature. Along those lines, the ocean elucidates the shades of love through its own mercurial mood swings. The wind holds its breath as it listens to the sea’s frothy lips hum soothing tunes of solace to lost sailors. Likewise, love blooms as a caressing warmth, encasing the heart’s gentle beat, tethering lost souls to each other. An anchor to hold one selves to during the darkest of nights, to bare the grueling pain of living wielding the strength of the latter, hands intertwined and minds in step.

But as humans, not all of us deserve happy endings. They become two blind hearts leading each other along a path of uncertainty. Sooty clouds hang like a hangman’s knot upon the roaring black of the battling torrent of waves, waging a brutal civil war against their own kin. Do you see, how fast unity can be divided, and the same water that was once breathing harmoniously as One snaps into a state of mania, implacably tearing each other apart, white fangs cutting through the inky depths?

So. Love.

It takes up every facet of your life, drains your blood and sucks out your soul. The sore heart is clawed out of the tender chest, flesh tearing, ribcage splintering-- the shattered bones ricochet hollow echoes of its tribulations. The vessel caging the delicate heart, it’s bony fingers locking it safely in the cushion of the body, succumbs to the battling fists of Love encrusted with shades of crimson. Unarmed and defenseless, the heart is pummeled and bludgeoned, gashed and bruised. It’s whimpers of agony, begs for wasted mercy, all drowned out and engulfed by the violent roars of inflicted pain, surging through veins and breaking out of the pit of the stomach.

But though the heart is untethered and flung to death into an abyss, it’s invisible fingers scratching down thin air in desperation- every cloud has a silver lining. For no matter how bloody and bruised the heart is beaten up to, no matter how many daggers are twisted within its soft pink flesh, it will remain always whole.

The pieces of the heart will remain woven with infinite elasticity, strings holding each other up, never letting go. The world may try to tear it with its bare hands, teeth bared and nails digging in frenzied efforts. But the heart will never yield. Through the cracked sobs, it will stretch and stretch and stretch. But it will inevitably and unrelentingly snap back. Safe and sound.

Maybe that is the real power of Love.

Love isn’t the emotion that brings two people together, no.

Love is the force that binds you to your glowing North Star – your heart.

By Snehasree Senthilkumar