By Drishti Kedia
Is love an art or science?
Complicated questions like this, I hope, alters the way you perceive things, completely in black and white. There's no in-between for you. But then, you have always been like that in the five years I've known you and no matter how many cups of coffee I make you, no matter how many sunsets I make you paint, no matter how many times I've held your hand and your face and told you that you're a child of the universe, you've never budged from the way you hold the cigarette in your hand and a heavy heart in the other, and say, the sky is heavy with god's tears.
You don't believe in god. you know he's a man falsely loved. Why are you such a paradox? Why can't I seem to stop wanting to figure you out, like you're a puzzle to piece together.
You tell me your favorite song is 'la vie en rose.' Do you know what that means? Or do you just say that to sound like poetry in a wine glass, to sound superficially artistic like how we did back when we pretended to be rich in the nights we were left with only our hands?
Together, we make a tapestry of five languages and yet, you pretend you don't understand when I confess my love to you. Yet, I pretend I don't understand when I ask you to speak in french just because and you say mon cœur t'appartient, then tell me the most far-off explanation of its meaning. How do I tell you I know exactly what it means? What YOU mean. I've been fluent in the language of love since 14.
I've spoken too much without making sense. I think I just don't want to answer the initial question. I think love is an art. It was meant to be an art. I believe, art comes with the primal state of being. Look at the cave paintings. The hand prints. The seals. The myths and the legends. The flowers that died to colour the earth even brighter? To love, to share a glass of wine, to laugh at jokes that only we understand, to cry over movies that were made fifty years back, and to read poetry off each other's lips, is art. And I'm an artist, incandescently in love with you.
You, who believes that love is a science. The innate nature of a man to mate with a woman to keep the species running, much like any other animal on this planet of ours. It's a ton of chemical reactions in the body that I don't understand and don't want to. All I know is that your body is a temple I want to worship. You explain love as a science because you see the world in black and white. I see it in gray.
Why are we in love with each other when we can't love each other the way we want to be loved?
Either way, I've left an annotated copy of "Normal People" on your bedside table. Read it if you want to. Perhaps then, you and I will understand each other. No matter that I already love you- this one time, Siken had gotten it all wrong.
By Drishti Kedia
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