Love Brought Me To This End

Love Brought Me To This End
You must love the person you are going to marry, it is said. At least this is what I’ve heard in the popular media. Apparently, this dictum doesn’t apply in my case. I don’t think the theorem applies in a majority of the cases I have known. Except for a lucky few, almost everyone has walked to the altar and has come back without knowing any details of the person with whom one is to be married.

Love is something that is supposed to develop after the formal ceremony. I shall have only a few moments of company with the one who is supposed to hold my hands and those few moments are supposed to be enough to give a boost to our resolve to both of us to keep holding each other’s hands for the rest of our lives.

Practically, the few moments are not going to be enough for anything concrete. One can never know about another person even after interacting with him or her for a lifetime, it is said. The few moments we shall have are not going to be enough to apprise the other person of all the shortcomings one has. I’m sure the other person has her share of shortcomings too, but they shall not be apparent and obvious to me. The moments are not going to be enough for anything significant.

They are to be like an advertisement of a product on the television. They are not going to be enough to propel love through us that is to sustain our relationship for a long time. They are not going to be enough for anything, but this is what is the norm. I shall not be the first person to be a part of the picture. The point is I feel I have been a bit different from my peers and contemporaries; life has not dealt its share of adversities with me like it does in the usual case.

There have been so many sharp differences in the way life has dealt with me, and yet the different ways can never be perceived to be any different from the crowd. There has been very little in me that makes me different from everyone around me, and yet there has been so much of angst and tension churning up within me over the years as a consequence of the remarkable way in which life has dealt with me. I sometimes do wonder why life chose to deal with me in a different manner from everyone else.

Had I walked on the path everyone does, I certainly would have been somewhere near my goal by now, but as it is, life chose to push me on a different track; it dealt with me in a different manner. The different track led to a different goal that remains an apparition for me even after walking for a long time on it. I might have been near the goal had I walked on the track trodden by everyone else, but life chose to push me on a different track.

The different track is different in its own unique way. There has been a unique set of hurdles and obstacles before me, and a major part of them have been because of a horde of shortcomings I have. The crux of the problem has been that there has been nothing to show to the world. My shortcomings have been buried deep within me in such a manner that they are not obvious and apparent.

This is the ideal way to deal with shortcomings. They should be hidden and esoteric. They shouldn’t be apparent to anyone  in the world. The world always salutes the rising sun; there shouldn’t be anything in me denoting a sunset or any negative aspect. The different track I have been pushed on should not be visible to anyone till I reach my goal. After all, it is only those who reach the goal who are finally honoured with a salute from the rising sun.

The truth remains that the sun has not begun to set in my life, but there have been several aspects of the movement of the sun that have been quite contrary to the norm. What I perceive as a sunset in my life is actually a sunrise: there is a halo dominant in the sky at both times, so there is no way of telling the difference between a sunrise and a sunset.

Another part of the problem has been that I have been forced to perceive myself and the world around myself as is seen by everyone else around me. People can never gauge the amount of dissonance set in by the flow of events in my life because they are not a part of me. They can never fathom the depth of oceans I have to wade through to get to the other end just as I can’t gauge the depth of the oceans they have to walk through.

Everyone puts up a brave front. Everyone puts up such a front that there is no way of telling if there is anything wrong with them. There is nothing wrong with anyone, except for my perception. I perceive everyone around me to be grappling for a hold in depths because I have had to grope around in the dark bottoms of oceans.