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a desi student-led literary community for artists everywhere.
It’s a simple four letter word, but its meaning is so much more complex than the four letters can convey. Love is making tea for your mother when she asks for it. Love is associating soft toys to people and hugging them when you remember those people. Love is thinking of someone and smiling. Love is being afraid of losing your friends and family, because they mean so much to you. Love could be you making videos, edits, poems, and just writing things for your friends. Love is what you want love to be, as long as you’re comfortable with it. Love is insane, love is divine and has literally no boundaries, and that’s the beauty of it. This Valentine’s day, the day which I and millions of others associate with love, (when companies make billions of dollars off marketing), I thought I could talk about how amazingly flexible the concept of love is by creating my own full form to it!!!!
The ‘L’ in love, according to me, is one of the most important letters. In my head it stands for “loss”; the fear of losing someone you love, the fear of drifting apart. As someone who constantly thinks that everyone is mad at them, I think it’s important to say that the fear of someone hating you or not loving you is, according to me at least, significant of love itself. Of course it’s great if you can be secure in your relationships with people, but that’s not always possible for everyone, because everyone is a different person, and I think it is important to acknowledge that.
Along with the fear of loss, the L could also signify (This one’s a bit far fetched but hear me out) “lumbar support”, the support a chair provides to your back bone with you sit on it. The support can be compared to the support you get and give from friends and family everyday because you love them and they love you. Love is so flexible that even this support, this backbone to your life if you will, has no specific definition. Lumbar support could be when your mother helps you by being there for you and spending all her day taking care of you, or it could even be someone checking in on you and asking you how you are.
L could also stand for “loser” which your friends call you because both of you have a mutual understanding that it's the way you show each other affection and it makes you both feel extremely happy. The L could be “luminosity”, the way some people just make you feel bright and happy and cause you to give them glistening grins. The L could be anything you want it to be, because love is not the same for any two people, it changes in how it is felt and expressed (if you think about it, the L could even stand for “lucrativeness”, the way companies profit off of valentine’s day).
It could even stand for “language”, talking about how different people have different love languages. One of my favourite love languages is making playlists for the people I love and the joy when people do the same for you is absolutely indescribable. You know love is divine when all the love songs suddenly start to make so much sense. The feeling of having something that I share with only a few other people and that we all understand that that’s how we express our love is absolutely great. The language could be playful teasing as you both understand that it’s how you express your affection for each other.
In my head, the O is symbolic of “obsession” and attachment. The feeling of liking something or someone so much that you cannot get enough of them. You always want to be around them, talk to them, watch movies with them, play games with them, or just sit in absolute silence as the both of you listen to music and do school work. O could stand for “Older” the way I want to grow old with certain people and spend my entire life with them, always and forever.
At one point, there was a thought among my friends (and the entire internet apparently) of someone peeling oranges and feeding you, and I think that the O could stand for “oranges”
as an homage to that because it’s a really divine way to think about love according to me.
The O could stand for “open”, a quality several relationships require to work.penness is an important aspect of any friendship, because when you are able to communicate your feelings without assuming a lot, it really helps in building stronger bonds with people.
The O could be “one-of-a-kind”, the way everyone’s love for each other is unique, or it could even stand for the word “observant”, like when you observe that someone is feeling down and you check in on them, or even observe that someone got a haircut or had a change in appearance and you compliment them on it.
The O could signify the “obscurity” of love, and how no one can ever truly understand the scope of it and how it’s so weird to you but you can’t get enough of it. Or even how your parents help you clean your room and keep it in an “orderly” manner. How every single person you love has an “organised” location in your brain and how you wouldn’t trade their place for anything else ever.
I think V is one of the harder words to find a meaning for since it is not as popular as the other letters, but I also think that it is this very quality that makes the letter more unique and interesting. V could stand for “validation”: the idea of feeling wanted and cared about by someone you love. It could be a compliment someone gives you, or even an action such as your mother making your favourite meal when you are sick, in the hopes of you feeling happy because she is tired of seeing you being sad. It could also be your friends giving you their jacket to wear because you thought it was pretty.
V could also stand for “vulnerability”, which some people may feel in a relationship with another person. V could also stand for “voice'', the way some people change their voice and the way they speak with different people so they can easily understand each other, which is something I do involuntarily, sort of like a reflex action. Most importantly, in the age of the pandemic, V could mean “video calls” where I hang out with the people I love on a daily basis.
Getting “Vanilla” ice cream together and laughing and talking could be what this letter signifies, because ice cream is one of the purest forms of love. V could even mean “vacuum”, the thing that you feel when you don’t talk to a person you love for an extended amount of time or when someone in your life drifts apart from you.
The V could be “valuable”, because every single one of my relationships with friends and family is important to me, and I wouldn’t be who I am today without them. There are a few people who I started talking to online and I haven’t met yet and there is nothing more valuable than the thought of running up to them and giving them a hug.
The last letter of this complicated yet beautiful word is what I think signifies “easiness”. How it is easy to talk to the people you love about anything. How I can easily go down for lunch with my parents and talk about how we love our cat or even gossip about something together. How I can talk to my friends about absolutely anything easily and they help me out in teaching me things I didn’t know.
The E could also be “energy”, the amount of energy you give to a person because of the amount you love them. The energy could be something that you bounce off of each other and share with each other. It could also be compared to how we feel good when we do “exercise” and spend “energy” the same way I personally feel good when I put in energy when I interact with the people I love dearly.
It could also be the “effort” people put in to put a smile on your face like painting you frogs or building things for you in a game, and how the effort they put makes you grin like an idiot. For me, there are several people that I love the most that have to put little to no effort to make me feel on cloud nine. And if I were to just watch the people I love for the rest of time, it would be “enough”.
“Eternity” is what the E could stand for. As in, wanting to know each other and talk to each other for all of eternity or hugging someone and staying there in embrace for all of eternity. Of course, this isn’t always possible, but like how everyone says, it's the thought that counts. The E could mean “evergreen'', which could signify how you feel lush and fresh when you talk to someone you love, like a bright sunlight glistening on the dew filled leaves of a plant. The E can be “eagerness” of wanting more or even earning each other’s trust and respect.
I hope you could understand what love means to me with this, and how there is no one way to experience it. It comes in many forms as well, it could be romantic, platonic, love for family, a sibling dynamic, or a million other things. Love has no limits.
There is a particular verse in the Bible which describes love, I think it is an extremely beautiful way to look at the whole concept of it -
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails”