Love isn't in the air

 The laundry-washed clothes have a unique smell of freshness, the freshness of it being clean, the goodness of it being good to go again! The day seems newer with a fresh ironed cloth on the body, the body seems fresh with a new soaked approach for the day. The birds talk to me, the purple flowers stare at me, I blush when they do that and I think, how am I not over them already! I never get over them. Every single time they make me feel purple, even if it's just for a moment. It's the same with humans too, I suppose. People who make you feel purple are purple themselves, they have their own color, they have their own sun trapped glow. There is no one way of describing an early morning sunrise and so there's no one way to describe that purple feeling. Sometimes when you can't measure something in quantity, you aren't able to say how much gravity it holds in words, so you reply with a silent adoration for the ocean before you. I see the ocean in his eyes and when they fall on mine, I dive in. I dive to see the Tyndall effect of his emotions and the aquatic system of his soul. Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder and the eyes of the beholder are really a piece of beauty; it has a crystal clear vision for life and an oceanic amount of love to feed. Purple is an intense color, as intense as awestruck eye contact. It doesn't let you adore itself, it hooks your attention like love at first sight; which I don't convincingly believe in. How can you see someone and fall in love right away? Does falling in love is all about eye pleasure? How does one identify love? All the definitions and evidence of the love that we have witnessed to date are recipes. We know the recipes, but we don't know how to cook. How to cook then?.. Let's prepare a meal this time and explore with me the different recipes so that you can choose which one you would like to cook.

I showered the coffee powder in the hot milk and the way it infused into it is how chemistry begins, or at least a subtle but firm first impression.  I am not talking about a completely made coffee, what I am talking about is the way milk allows itself to be colored by coffee; that moment when they meet for the first time, that lipstick brown color diffusion when they are trying to make sense of their meeting. I drank coffee and realized how the two different intensities of milk and coffee are brought in perfect unison in my tongue. I thought to myself if this is what togetherness feels like. I really don't know what I tried describing here but I hope you get it because I believe that most things that are felt deeply cannot be described simply. Feelings are not at the mercy of validation from a rationale. It doesn't care if you can describe it; it's there when it's there. We always feel hungry for something or the other; the hunger subsides for a while but it never ends. Sometimes the hunger is at its peak as if it's purple, some other times it is subtle, like pink. Between these two poles of intensity lies the equator called *lavender*. Lavender is the average that settles down the conflict of intensity. Lavender is people like me who fall in the gray area. The area less explored, let alone discussed. So let's discuss it, shall we...

When you have a look at your closet, I am sure you would find a bunch of intense souls like black, blue, or red and a bunch of peaceful ones like white or yellow or pink. Your closet is a reflection of what the world is aware of, the blacks and the whites, the loose and the tights, the dumb and the brights. There is hardly any evidence of the gray area, the area that blends the two extremes into different shades of gray. The area that's not as bold as purple and not as shy as pink, it's the area that allows understanding of both into one as lavender. It's a bit of a confusing color, not many know of. At present times, it's not even a color, it's a shade. It's my shade, that's how I love or exist; in shades. I know I don't live boldly because I am not upfront or straightaway confident; I have a resting bitch face that tricks people into thinking I have an attitude; which everyone should have by the way. I was a lot like pink one time; as much on the rim of fragility as that of a ripened peach. But gradually time layered me with the strength of coconut shell, but I am tender inside and I protect my soft corners by being lavender. It's a shade I discovered when I turned 26, that's when I sort of discovered myself too or at least allowed myself to understand my shade. I was very mature when I was a teen, very innocent, very naive but mature. No matter what I had or had not in life, I always had me; the original me, the lavender me. When you don't witness rare shades like lavender around yourself, you start to think that this shade doesn't belong anywhere and you too start to wish for purple or green. I use to admire people who could engage an audience, make them laugh, or hook them with their energy. Undoubtedly I liked purple for a long time, I dreamt of it mostly. I use to wonder how in the world they are so confident about everything they speak, almost robotic. Are they experts in chemistry? because they exactly know what reactions would work for them. Purple is a color that can't go wrong, they say. Really? Is it always that? It does go wrong if you put it on lips, I mean I am not fond of purple lipsticks. Lips are a place for syrupy colors like pink, so that's where purple goes wrong(no offense!). Pink is a baby color, it's a submissive, sort of pristine, mushy color. It's a color of a new bud from a seed, it's a color of the beginning, it's a color that colors shyness just like the shy coffee infusion into the milk. Young love is very pink, it's when you are curious about the person, the kind of curiosity that brings a smile for no reason. It's like a sleeping baby situation wherein you want to adore the baby till eternity but you also want to squish the cheeks and wake him up. When two people are in love, they understand each other. Love for me is "understanding". If I love you, I need to understand the elements that make you, YOU. The reason I call it understanding is because it's not a feeling-driven drive entirely, it's a choice-driven move. You make a choice to let that person be, what that person is, by giving your effort to understand that person. For all the gigantic things in the world, the fundamental reason for their existence is insanely basic. The entire roar of an ocean comes down to a molecule of water that contains two hydrogens and oxygen in the right chemistry. This chemistry is fundamentally so intact and simple that it supports the life of an entire planet, let alone making Earth the only planet that supports life. That's what right chemistry does; it always aims at autonomic unity. The hydrogen and oxygen don't lose their chemical property when they are unified together as water; their chemistry didn't alter their inherent chemical existence. Such a union in the magnificent amount does something as godly as creating a whole lively planet. Had there been no understanding between hydrogen and oxygen, of their chemical properties, there wouldn't have been a concept of "LIFE" at all. A good sign of you being in love with someone and I am not talking about the "phase when it's all pink and purple in the head and heart"🙈, is that you are willing to understand that person for his/her abilities and shortcomings. "The most romantic thing in the world is the feeling of being understood"- no idea who said it, but makes sense!. Out of all the grand romantic gestures in the world, this one surpasses everything. Someone who can understand that you are down in dumps just by the way you hold your cup or say hello. They know that something's wrong when they find 2/3rd of your plate left with food and you are done. They can recognize your joy from a distance since your smile brings peace to their life too. Love for me isn't something that is in the air, just like lavender it's in the shades of moments with your beloved person. It's in the details, it's in the little things that strike your nerves in a way that only you can comprehend. True love is just "love not giving up on love" because that is the only truth it knows. That's why it is said that you fall in love because falling here denotes that you submit yourself to your partner's reason of smile. Falling in love with someone also raises your own conscience about yourself. As much as hydrogen and oxygen retain their chemical architecture, they do engineer themselves for the chemistry that creates water. The world is not all black or white, it's a large part between them, it's a large part not perfect, it's a large part that exhibits "diversity". Nobody should shed any inherent part of them to find space in someone else's part but that doesn't mean we don't welcome diversity of opinions and inputs. That's how the next generation is created, one part parent, one part newly formed life.  The understanding that needs establishment is the sweet spot between being who you are while you are in love and who you become when in love. When we don't know who we are in the first place, finding our place in love becomes tricky and often unpleasant. So a large part of love in my opinion is lavender; where no extremes of purple or pink steal the whole limelight, it's the blend that creates the trend. It's not just the way somebody holds your hand, it's also how the hand-holding helps you cross the road in traffic without even asking for it. It's not all about passionate kisses and cheek marks (although that sounds amazing too😜), but the ritual of starting your morning by the shower of adoration-driven pecks. It's when you cook Maggi at odd timings like 2am because of your partner's odd stomach and a cute face that demands it!. It's when you love irritating them because now they feel like family, who bore the brunt of loving us at the cost of tolerating our shit. It's when you just want to adore them (especially eyes) for all your life or maybe you just want the time to freeze when you adore them as if you found magic. It's addictive, it's like sunrise and sunsets mostly, one doesn't get enough of. A great sign of love is also peace. When life feels sorted because of a person, then you might as well prepare yourself for the fall in the well of love. When being with someone makes you feel free or unwinds you then it might lead to a lover's spot. When conversations make you curious about life, society, science, food, and everything that surrounds you, it continues day by day. Every day you wait for those conversations to start again and feel the energy that comes from them. Romance is all about touches or gestures or playful fetishes; I call them purple.  Love is a spectrum that encompasses all the shades. It means different to different people but fundamentally its definition resides in these terms; understanding, time, and affection. I am a writer, one who's bad at gifts and surprises but I give time to people when they need me, I give them my full attention when they speak, I give them my affection to understand them. This is not some self-praise-driven statement, I have been a listener all my life no matter who came and went. I listen, that's the only quality I can assure about myself. Nothing in the world makes a man sexier than his quality of listening and letting a woman finish her sentence(if you know what I mean). When you are confident in your own shoes, you would also carry the patience to wait for your turn. Woman, on the other hand, has many different metrics to consider. The top spot is undoubtedly taken up by beauty and body. The most beautiful body is the one that carries a mind that doesn't give a shit about your ideas of beauty. The way you see a person has less to do with their shape than their thinking. Beauty is more about grace than the face. It literally is. I have fallen in love with so many minds than the body, with so many thoughts than the words that I have literally no clue of how beautiful you are unless I talk to you. Charm is rare, rest everybody got heat. 

I don't have a perfectly shaped body; I do dream of one(as if dreaming would put me in shape😂), but I know that what I don't have is changeable and therefore I remain at peace with who I am from the atom; my atoms are well-shaped, they have integrity and truthfulness and very less tolerance for hypocrisy. I always loved myself enough to identify love and truth from the abundance of "winning over" and "claims". Love is irreplaceable, understanding is irreplaceable, your attention is irreplaceable, your time is irreplaceable. When we try to place any other thing instead of the irreplaceable, the chemistry gets replaced. The chemistry of eye contact, the chemistry of hand-holding, the chemistry of calling your partner with absurd but cute nicknames.  Hence, the grandest romantic gesture is your ability to understand their silence and the most expensive gift is to offer them your "time". Love has a unique way of arriving in life just like floaters in the sky. When you focus they run away, when you don't they linger around. And when it arrived, I no longer rely only on a mirror for my reflection because he sees me in a way I didn't see myself before, he loves me in a way I was never loved before, he hears me in a way I was never heard before and therefore he has me in a way nobody ever had me before. When a man falls in love, he can never unlove that person regardless of whether he spends his life with that person. When a woman falls in love, the love is never betrayed; she remains loyal to even the idea of that person she is in love with. Men need charm, women need grace. Women need charm, men need grace. Qualities of charm and grace don't have gender. Feelings don't have gender. Love doesn't have gender. Love is not the air, it's the chemistry that cooks inside you when you try a recipe. It's the strength that makes you cut mountains, it's the weakness that people use to cut you, it's foolish only when you try to use your logic, it's logical only when you try to live a life. 

So wear a shade of lavender and feel its warmth. 

Go crazy in love if you see the truth in it. And lastly,

Never settle for anything less than love because nothing is more than that.

Nikku loves you (pyarse dost mujhe nikku bulate hen).........PYAR DO, PYAR LO😍 no bargaining!!!