Discovering it, discovering love.. :)

What is it? That mysterious feeling, the one that everyone talks about so often, yet can never explain. What defines it? How can you tell from any other feeling or emotion?

Well no answer is usually the answer to these questions, and if any try to explain, they invariably fail. After all, it is not something that can be neatly, scientifically defined with various labels or assigned any symptoms, for everyone one has a different approach to it, each persons path follows a different set of directions and crosses different trails en route to this destination. For those who have known it, it is something very beautiful yet, like the best pieces of abstract art, undefined, imparting different impressions and meanings to everyone, and thus it is something to be experienced, to be felt and enjoyed, but never defined. But for those who haven't experienced it yet, it is a mysterious puzzle, a riddle with no apparent answer, and thus it was with me.

All the while I searched for something like, i found nothing. Hunting high and low in vain, trying to define it, to give it a shape and forcing my expectations on to it. Questioning every thought and feeling to see if it had finally arrived. I was searching so hard for it, too hard in fact, and so it never came. All that i saw were mere mirages of that which was promised, teasing me from afar.

Frustrated, i finally gave up searching, i gave it up as something incomprehensible and absurd, something existing only for dreamers, forgetting that while part of me was a sharp thinking rationalist, a part was a dreamer. I went about scorning all those who wandered mooning about it a hopeless romanticists, not knowing the romantic that lay slumbering within.

And ironically, the minute i gave up searching for it, it began its approach. The very instant i gave up on it, it entered my life, quietly like a thief in the night, gently like the cool morning breeze, riding within the Trojan horse of a friendship, that was destined to be something more, it penetrated my defenses, the walls i had set up, breaking through and gently awakening all that lay hidden within. It opened me up to something different, new, something unexpected and wonderful. There was no fan-fare, no drums and trumpets no waving banner, just an unexplained warmth and quiet smiles, and i realised that it had finally arrived.

It was all that i expected yet more than I'd have ever thought. It was all i had imagined and yet so much more that even imagination couldn't cover it all. Of course one thing is for sure, while i feel it, i still can't explain it. Its the way i can't keep my eyes off hers, the way i mean it with all my heart when i tell her that i love her. Its like the rush of heart when i feel her warm breath on my ears as she whispers those three words to me, the warmth that surges through me when i touch her hand, the sincerity with which i tell her that she's beautiful. The way way I accept her for who she is and she accepts me, it shows up in how even when she annoys me, i can't help but feel that happy glow. It comes to me as that feeling of comfort and safety, the feeling that everything will be alright when she wraps me in her warm caring embrace.

Its so little, and yet so much. It appears so clear and yet so obscured. It can happen anytime, anywhere, can take any form. For me its blossomed in those tender words, that warm touch and that loving embrace.

-ak