Lately, I have thought about love more than I should have. I have woken up with it waiting on the bedside table. I have slept with it waiting there still. No, not love itself, but the thought of it, and through the day, I have had it torture me in the most subtle but most infuriating of ways. But where was this thought for all these years? I do not know. Perhaps I had my heart hidden in some drawer in a cupboard I did not have the key to, and now, now that it is out in the open, I have begun to realise how an idea that evoked hope, evoked all sorts of joy in me once is now but a remnant of utter disillusionment. There is no reason for this except the general apathy that sets within the hearts of the downtrodden, not that it curbs their want for riches, like it has not curbed my want for love, but the apathy for riches exists in some sort of absurd contradiction. It seems it is now present in me, too, for all of us are beggars for one thing or another.
This situation is not for the lack of complete surrender on my part. I have, time and again, bared my soul in front of a person, hoping for something I cannot put into words. Acceptance, perhaps, but I could not be too sure about it. For all my want for love, I do not know how I want it or for whom, and like a duckling that imprints onto the first person it sees, I, too, tend to follow people around with unmatched loyalty. They say when something falls, we must not try to look at it but hear it, that if we want any chance of finding it, we must close our eyes and let our instincts pinpoint it with supreme accuracy. They say we were built this way. But what does one do when hope falls and sinks? I have been standing in a silent room with my eyes closed for years. The complications of modern love have embittered me, and then, saying that I realise, what is modern love? It has been this way for as long as people have been this way. Some of us carry streaks of near-misses on our sleeves, and we laugh at parties and make jokes about it all, and then we come home, and we sit with our eyes closed, listening still, to find what has been lost to the years.