Imaginary love

Today’s note is dedicated to a person who taught me something special. Love. Do you know what it means?Do I know? Yes, I believe i do.If I were asked to describe it, I would say that it is something out of this world.

I am in a relationship. There is a guy whom I love. But, this thing called love is something that I am supposed to know about for many years.

I don’t know from where I should start.

When I just started growing up, I became a person who liked to spend times with herself. I liked staying alone and kept thinking many things.I liked reading thoughtful things. I read romantic novels and stories. I enjoyed but never truly loved them. Yes, while some of them were good, few described love in a broader way where the author would describe how a person might feel, rather than how the person acts when he or she is in love.

I enjoy when love is described in a mysterious way. I began to believe that love is in the world.

I believe that only a few special people feel love and the rest of the people only think that they are in love. Others may think that they are love, or have experienced it, but they actually have not.They just like a person for sometimes. Such people just "like" a person for a time and think it is "love". Love cannot be bound within a timeline. It is timeless. No matter what happens, it never dies.

I had an imaginary lover. Yes, it’s true. There were times when I imagined a person who loved me a lot. I loved him a lot but somehow we were separated and that caused us to hunger just to see each other once again. I imagined that he was somewhere working very hard, doing all possible things just to be with me in the future. He kept on missing me a lot, thinking about how I would look when he would meet me. And so on…so many imaginations that never made me feel alone.

I did not enjoy doing that. Rather it was painful for some extent. Sometimes I just felt I started becoming a philosophic person. Philosophic in my teen age. And there was a part of me which totally disliked that. I stopped thinking that way. I thought that would take me nowhere but would make me a reserved person.

So I finally broke up with him.

But he found me again.

When I was 18 or 19, I watched a telefilm, that took me to a different world which again made me feel his presence.

In that story, there was a lady, who wrote letters to an imaginary lover. She was used to do that since she was a teenager. Her imaginary lover is a person whom she loved more than her life. She always wanted to be with him. But, he was in Indian army and he was to go to the war. She cried and wrote letters to him. She imagined death of her lover in the war. It was painful than anything that could happen. But she never left writing to him and explaining how her life is going, who she got married, had a wonderful husband, had a beautiful daughter and so on. Those letters were not her diary. But they are a medium through which she was connected to someone whom she believed to be the most special person in her world. She thought that in her happiness and sorrow, he was always with her, thinking about her well being, wishing good for her, giving her a moral support whenever she needed. And thus that lady kept that imaginary lover in her heart forever.

In that story there was a twist. When her daughter was 16, she found a letter where her daughter was writing to her boyfriend that she loved him madly and she couldn’t think of living without him.

The lady came to know that her daughter was in love with a Muslim man. It was impossible for her to allow her daughter to go and marry that man where they belonged to an orthodox Hindu family. She decided to get a good groom and made the marriage soon.

At her daughter’s 17 year she had to marry only because her mother thought that there was a Muslim man who would take her daughter away spoiling all the family reputation.

When the lady was in her sixties, she fell ill seriously and on her death bed. She called her daughter.

She said sorry to her that she couldn’t stand by her when she was in love. She felt guilty that her only daughter had to sacrifice her love for her family. At that moment the daughter couldn’t get what her mother was saying.

Later she understood that her mother had once encountered with one of many letters that she used to write to an imaginary lover. She explained her mother how she had a habit to think about a person who actually did not exist but in her mind he was everything for her. She used to write letters to that man. But after her marriage she stopped doing that.

Her mother felt regret for what she did unknowingly.

In her last words, she revealed her secret of keeping an imaginary lover throughout her life, she also showed her those letters and told her to read few of them.

She said her daughter that the imaginary lover taught her what love actually mean and how powerful it can be. That special person enlightened whole of her life. She never felt alone because of him and she felt the truth that love is about giving. He never asked her anything in return.

Actually today I am describing this story in my words. I don’t remember the exact dialogues that were being said by the characters. But that story told me something. That whatever used to happen with me, actually happens to many people. So, this kind of story was written. I already left that imaginary person.

I admit that the idea of true love, how it should be, and how two people actually feel when they are in true love, a notion, these all came into my mind by keeping an imaginary lover. When I stop thinking about him, I lost the faith in the existence of true love. In later years, I came to know about platonic love. Today all I know about love is that it happens to all human being. Some do respect it and they have the strength to live with it forever. It doesn’t matter whether it’s real or imaginary; love always makes a person powerful.

It always gives a sense that you are not alone. Somebody somewhere is always there for you.

I know I can never be alone.