15. 05. 19
I’ve been wondering for a while what sets love apart – what makes it so much more than just another emotion. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far.
Pretty much every other emotion that humans are capable of feeling, humans are also capable of engineering. You want two people to hate each other? Tell one that the other messed with the first one’s wife. You want to make somebody sad? Kill their best friend. You aim to excite? Tell them the love of their life is ringing the doorbell at this very time.
Love can let you manipulate the human mind into feeling pretty much any other conceivable emotion. It is, in some way or the other, the source of every feature we use to distinguish ourselves from the all-encompassing category of “animals”. Passion, war, invention, and despair are all consequences of the overwhelming presence and absence of love that we all walk around with. How unfortunate it is then, that love itself cannot be fashioned from any combination of events, traits, or emotions. It isn’t something you feel in reaction to a certain set of actions or appearances.
It isn’t something you feel.
Love happens.
That’s why you often don’t notice love grow until it’s going to overflow. You feel only its side effects until almost the very end. It is a dream you need to wake from to be able to recall rationally.
You sit up and find yourself finally able to attribute all the cranky episodes and highs of the last few days, months, years, to Love, which presents itself all at once. The mechanisms of this revelation can be many. Maybe you call somebody up and realize you want to do that every day for the rest of your life. You see them ask another girl out and feel yourself die. You get caught up in conversation. You lose track of time. You find yourself unable to stop thinking of the exact color of their eyes. You replay not the kiss, but the moment right before, when hope of something more lies suspended like a fog of confetti. You feel like the world and its words can never be enough. Love threatens to overflow.
And overflow it does. It is the leaking bits of love that form the foundation for all the other stuff mentioned earlier on – sadness and hope and anger. It is love that is always at its full effect. This isn’t to say that the quantity of love itself is always enough, but that no matter how much of it you may have, that amount exerts profound effects. An intense love, receding love, a kinda-too-comfortable-mediocre love, the lack of love, each though varying in quantity and quality, are equally full when it comes to influencing the moods and ways of humanity. And since, as has already been established, we cannot seem to fabricate love,
we drift through life waiting for love
to happen, for when it arrives
it brings with it the tides
of every other vivid aspect
of life.
heartinthematter 