More than Words : Avaak

"Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another." - Atlas Shrugged

The one true form of art that can lead on to a catastrophe of revelations; the one true gesture that makes one do the most regretful actions they shall ever- is the need to – Express. 

Yes, well… Lady Positive is in the Dark Room my friends! And yes, I shall drown you with me!!! 

Love is truly a game. It is that insufferable need for us humans to fall into the arms of anything and everything that makes us “feel alive”. Yeah well sometimes jumping into a pot full of hot oil can fry the bit-Jesus out of your alive-ass. Just because it looks like love, it may not be so. Like those times when we fake a fever to get out of going to school.

It’s amazing how the overwhelm of winning a game gets to any relationship from the very beginning. Who called first? Was it you texted her? Or she who tried to make the first conversation, who calls and at what time of the day, who has a bigger phone bill? Who sent whom the first friend request? Who has liked whose images? 

Bereft of subtlety and lacking the very privacy of relationships, “this guy I met”, “this girl whom I’m seeing these days” becomes the coffee table discussion among friends. The commoditization of a person begins. We express…prophesize…gossip…and bitch.

But love is not something to be expressed. Not because it can’t be or doesn’t need to be, but because when you truly and completely love someone, the precise moment when you are to express it, all sense in you escapes. The only things that come to your mind are the bare minimum words to sustain a feeling so immense that words run scared. In fact, I learnt from a very dear friend recently… how immense under-expressed love can be.  

Love expressed is so much sweeter to the ears than love unexpressed. However, nothing can substitute the pang of affection you feel for someone who did something for you while you were looking the other way. 

Something that you came across days, maybe months or even years later from a stranger or a distant friend; something you know you will always be indebted to them for but you were far too eager to “hear” it rather than “see” what the person did for you. Love is something that is the hardest to explain. And yet, we long for more and more of the verbal expression, choking the other for words.

I also at this point, with no offense to feminists like me, would like to point out how the two sexes are two ends of the spectrum when it comes to “talking”. To most of my guy friends, merely “talking” or yapping isn’t expression. It runs much deeper. 

Picking you up from your workplace and dropping you home, getting your phone recharged when you’re busy running around in local trains, waiting for your call when you are away travelling, talking to your friends and getting to know them, finding comfort among your people, making you a part of their friends’ circle… 

...making sure they are the last person who’s voice you hear before you fall asleep and the first person who hears your groggy voice in the morning, waiting for you to calm down when you’re unreasonably cranky and touchy, and running to you for solace…these count for more than words. 

I am still astonished how very few of us women enjoy silent conversations. Why so? How can one not notice any of these? And if we do… how the hell can we still demand for words of expression instead of actions. 

“You never tell me enough”?!! Do they need to?  Okay, maybe yes… when it really matters. When nothing can substitute the feeling of hearing those words but excessive expression and repetition is like cheap advertisement that relies only on nagging the audience into memorizing the words.

Love and hate are far too heavy and strong to be expressed fully. This takes me to Gregory David Robert’s ‘Shantaram’, “Fear drives a man’s mouth dry, and hate strangles him. That’s why hate has no real literature: real fear and real hate have no words.” (Ch. 18, Pg. 414). 

I would parallel it to Love. Real love has no real literature too. It’s probably the denial or deprivation of that love that makes for good literature- like real tragedy… not reveling in it. Reveling in it is intrinsic. Like music.