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Wind like people


There are some people who enter your life like the wind. Fast, howling, turn everything topsy turvy.  But just like a windstorm, you get used to the screeching and noise. When they are gone, nothing seems as meaningful as it did with them. You feel you just cannot, for the life of you, enjoy anything without them ever again. Your days lose their color and nights become meaningless. You want to hate them with all your being but are unable to. No matter what they do, they occupy a very special part of your heart, sometimes without any contribution of theirs. This is just how you feel. One of the most desperately sad things is when the feelings are not reciprocated. Why, oh why do we give people this power over our lives? We, the independent, world's-at-my-feet, career-oriented women.

Aren't we supposed to be tainted by society for having no heart and achieving our career goals at any cost aka at the cost of our relationships and families? Why do we then let someone enter our heart without any barriers and surrender our hearts to them? We can't even prove the society's stereotypes right without putting our personal spin to them. The twist is that 'they' the part of society who you thought were nothing like it, think of you exactly as the stereotypical go-getter who doesn't belong in their heart or home. It's just you, yourself who knows how frustrating it is that for all that famous  'go-getter-ness', you are unable to get the one you really want.

You wonder what on earth happened to you. Some tell you it's called love. Something tells you yes, that might be it but then, you wonder, there are several types of love. You wonder which is the 'right' or 'good' type. You wonder if there's a bad type. You wonder what it all means. You hear people complaining left and right why they weren't taught 'this stuff' in schools when they spend so much time learning things that they may never use in real life. You look at these people, smile, nod in sympathy but are unable to empathize. To you, it just feels natural. You have no idea what hit you. You are deep in something. What it is, you have no idea.

If this is love, isn't love supposed to be 'all-giving'? Shaking your head ruefully you think of a song's lyrics: "Only know you love her when you let her go". Isn't the other person's happiness supposed to be the ultimate goal whether or not that includes you? And when you let yourself feel that way about someone you wonder, isn't love supposed to be reciprocal? Isn't a relationship an equal partnership? You give and you take? You should want the other person to be happy but should want yourself to be happy too. Your happiness is being with them, so you want their happiness to be with you too, you reason. If your feelings are not reciprocated to the intensity you want, whether by being more or less, it just doesn't feel right. Which of all these different forms is love?  Or is it neither? Are they all one?

You crave answers. Get sympathetic looks whenever you ask these questions and get tired of them after a while. That is of course if you actually dare to put yourself out there in the first place for fear of these looks. You spend countless nights tossing and turning, searching your soul. You turn to nature, go for long hikes, spend hours by the ponds and lakes bird watching. Pour yourself into work, spending hours putting the most perfectionist of your circle to shame. Or maybe you stare at the screen for minutes at the end, unsure what you were about to do, your brain turning an absolute blank. You start writing in your journal only to abandon any efforts of pouring your heart out after 'dear diary...' You surround yourself with friends and family and force yourself to smile the whole time pining to get back to the secluded confines of your personal space. You take long trips, driving distances you wouldn't have dreamed of before.

When nothing works, you just decide to lay low, put your head down for a while, deactivate your social media accounts, read some books, eat tubs of ice cream and binge watch movies. Oh, but then you realize that you can't actually do any of that because all the movies remind you of that someone, and even if they don't, you want to share everything that made you laugh or the amount of ice cream you inhaled in two days with who else but that someone.

It's at that point, in the middle of a movie, spoonful of ice cream raised mid-air, you realize that Oh boy, you are back to square one!

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