If I were to explain what being in love is like, I would illustrate my first memory of wearing glasses at the age of eight.
Yes, being in love is like wearing a new pair of glasses for the very first time.
You used to have a very blurred vision of the world – literally. As a short-sighted person, you can’t see more than a few metres in front of you clearly. You describe the world as a spur of colours and lights. Everything dances in motion while you sit still, trying your best to make out one shape from another. It’s a bit bothersome, true, but that’s the world as you know it. The only way you know it.
Then one day you find yourself at the optician and you are given a pair of glasses. You put them on. And you find yourself in awe.
The world looks completely different now that you’re peering from these miraculous lenses. Everything is bursting from such dizzying clarity. You can now see the lines that demarcate your favourite book, the lines in the palm of your hand, the gentle wrinkles around your dad’s eyes. You realise that the light from lamp posts on the side of the streets are bright and focused, not fluorescent yet bleared.
Oh and you see the less refined things too, which your shortsighted eyes used to protect you from. You begin to understand that what you thought was just pale-shimmering colours are actually a pile of uncared for trash, or a graffiti of profanities in spray paint. You can now see the grim frowns on people’s faces that used to be just a hazy shape of facial features. But this is your world now, and not only do you learn to accept it, you begin to enjoy it as well.
That’s what being in love is like.
You used to live in a world which was quite uneventful yet peaceful nonetheless. Romance is all around you, but you’re quite content with just yourself, your family and friends, and the occasional firting with an opposite sex. Sure, sometimes you wonder whether you’ll eventually find “the one”, but you’re young and you know you still have plenty of time.
Then suddenly, you fall in love.
And your worldview changed. You begin to see the world differently. The way you experience things changed. You even find yourself growing and you discover many things about yourself that were unknown to you beforehand.
But one day, your glasses were snatched away from you. They were thrown to the ground, where they broke, shattered to pieces. You find yourself back to the old world, the pre-glasses world. You were okay with it then, so you try your best to slip back into your old way of living.
The thing is, back then you didn’t know of a different world. But now you do.
To make it worse, now you’re used to look at the world from love-coloured glasses. You read the news and your eyes will perk up at anything slightly related to the loved object. You see things as something which they would like or dislike. You judge a situation by how they would judge it. You value so-and-so by how they would value so-and-so. You never realised it before, but they had influenced you in such a way that you cannot un-learn your new way of seeing the world.
So you don’t try to un-see.
You just get a new pair of glasses. 😉
shaffira gayatri 