This post is by a young and upcoming writer, Shreeradha Mishra, who has been toying with words and tugging at heartstrings since a very young age. I have had the privilege of hobnobbing with this child of Destiny thanks to a leaf each that we occupy on the same family tree. Reading this brought tears to my eyes and made me realise how we must promise to love again instead of asking whether or not we can love again – because love we must and – love, we must.

You can find the complete post right here

When I Can Love Again

When I can love again, please allow me the liberty to love you in freedom.

Please do not seek “commitment”, because in the many ways I have loved, I have realized that commitment often becomes an excuse to let go of oneself.

When I can love again, I would want you to accept that I am not yours, and you are not mine. I can never be yours. I belong only to myself. And you belong only to yourself. Nobody should have the right to take you away from yourself. What will you have to offer, to fill, to cherish then, if you don’t have yourself? I can share myself with you, the best parts of me, and worst of me. And I want you to share yourself with me. Because that is what love is, to trust and to invest, invest yourself, and to invest ‘in’ yourself. The two things can never be mutually exclusive.

In our years, that may seem many to some, and few to some, but only we know by our respective experiences how many those years were, and how heavily they have weighed on us; I have also learnt a thing or two about the various, at times irrational, and inexplicable ways of love and life. How we shape up as individuals, I firmly believe, is a product of the various roles we play in the various relationships of our lives. People come and go, and between the coming and the going our hearts are tested to see how much love they can hold. Between the coming and the going, however, some bruises stay as brutal reminders of important lessons learnt. Giving comes so easily to some of us, and while I am grateful for being someone who genuinely believes in the joy of giving, I am scared of my soul emptying itself.

Commitment, in my opinion, confines our ability to love in freedom. Why do we fool ourselves, our partners, and most of all, our hearts, by being so naive as to believe that we can really commit ourselves to an individual? When the only person we truly belong to, is ourselves. Why do we always look for boundaries, for definitions, for labels? Not only in the way we love, but in almost everything we do in life. I feel that the purpose of our transient lives is singular: to learn from and with each other, to find and share love, light, and joy. To seek these when we are in despair, and to become a source for the same, a beacon of hope for those in despair. And in the process, to evolve and to understand, and accept the fact that change is the only constant.

Commitment demands not only on the present, but also the future. And, in many frightening ways, on your past.

I cannot give that to you.

Most of all, I cannot lie, that you have or will have all my tomorrows. I can only give you what I have today – my present. And that I shall give willingly, and with all my heart for as long as it nourishes the both of us. In return, I ask the same of you. Do not promise me what as mortals neither you, nor I, can ever control. If you love me “now”, it is enough for me.

When I can love again, I want to be able to love you without ascribing a specific compartment to it. I want to be able to love you freely, consciously, and truthfully.

When I can love again, I will not know what our destinies hold for us, but I know that I only have my present to be able to love you. And that is what I plan on doing. Commitment, I feel is a premature attempt to “make sense” of things we apprehend in the future, I feel it is the need to “secure” a future. In a larger sense, it also is an attempt to secure a person. To ‘copyright’ the feelings of a person. Commitment often becomes an excuse for honesty. But what I do not understand is, how can there be any love without honesty? I’d rather seek love, over commitment.

When I can love again, I want to love you in freedom, with all my will and consciously. Will it be enough for you to know that I only have my present to offer you? To say “only”, is almost an insult. Can we ever be sure of anything else but our present? Much of the bitterness we deal with in our lives, I feel, is because of the inadvertent expectations we impose on our futures.

I hope that whenever I pause to look back, and in my deepest moments of despair, the memories we make evoke the three elements, which, I believe, are life-giving – love, light, and joy. Even if we may prefer to plant our roots away from each other someday.

But again, I can only hope. Because, que sera sera.