one love.

‘One Love’.

We have all heard that song.

I must agree, you do fear being called gay if you're caught listening to it (which I do once a year or so, not more).

But I wonder, why is it one love? Why not more? It could, very obviously, mean that all you need to live is one love but this has various interpretations as well.

(I write this from the point of view of a girl, cause that is one that is clearer. We men aren't so sure of what we feel about this highly dangerous word - love.)

"One love is all we need" is true if that love is with you today and loves you as you do him.

One love could also mean that one man that you've loved in your life may/may not be in your life any more. The mere memory of that love you had for each other or sometimes only the love you had for him is enough for you. It may be enough for a lot of reasons again.

The first and the more romantic one is that the memory of that love is so strong, so pure and so moving that no other human bond that you establish after that can bring out the same feelings of pure joy or bliss as I've heard many girls describe it. That time in your life when you could just sit in silence looking at the sky and still feel so much, as if they world was right there, captured by your five senses. The whole world had shrunk into those four boundaries of the sheet you had laid out on the grass. And that world still exists in your mind. It will always exist. That world is your happy place.

The other more tragic reason and one more commonly given is that of heart ache. The world described above existed in all instances of love. These are not cases where you say you love someone; these are those tales which begin with the knowledge of being in love.
When this world, like all those beliefs we harbour from childhood, built on fairy tales and folklores of Santa and Prince Charming, shatters the passage of time, the shock sends you reeling.

That world of bliss did not break due to problems between two people; it broke due to the belief that the perfect world you were living in would remain perfect forever. When you realised in some fleeting moment of reality that this world isn't the one described in those fairy tales even though it felt every bit like it, you recoil in horror. You wonder if it ever existed.

It never did.

What made it so, was you. I don't use the pronoun 'you' to signify both you and your ‘love’, I mean only you.

We blame Archie's and its Valentine's Day for so many problems every year. Those business men know how to sell a product. They strike at the weakness of every human being, a child; the child inside you who was longing to grow up, to live in the big bad world and still find happiness.
No child ever thinks he will grow up to be sad. He knows that sad people walk around him every day, but he never lets himself think he can be one of them growing up. That thought hasn't been planted in his delicate mind yet.

The will to be truly happy is so blinding that you accept the first sign of something new and good as the same signs you've read of in books and seen in numerous movies; each incident leading up to some happy ending. Each incident form then on seems to you like it is something you know is going to happen because the world of writers en-capsules all events that can and cannot occur in your life. And so this strange familiarity seems comforting.

Our brains, tricky little blobs, only take us to the places we want them to in our times of joy and only to those places we don't want to go to in the days of sorrow.

You spin a story in your head. Your love story is written for you and by you without your knowledge.

When that story starts to deviate from that fairy tale, the little gaps of information that your brain collected but chose to ignore start coming back to your memory and you see things in a completely new light. The light of reality; it's a bitch.

Your own life and the recent months of bliss begin to seem different. You start doubting its every moment. Every memory that you held so close seems tainted; tainted by that doubt that it ever existed. Even though nothing changed from then till now, it seems like everything has.

And that doubt is too difficult to cope with. The knowledge that the one thing you held most sacred in your life was a mere illusion is so enormous a weight on your intellect that you hit rock bottom.

Now you can't trust your brain.

It tricked you. In all relationships one doubt is enough to shatter the bond of trust. The same happens again, only this relationship is with your brain, your heart if you must.

You don't trust yourself. You try to put the blame for this treachery on the world or on him. It's easier that way, eases the guilt. You make up defences in your head to somehow save that memory of 'love' from this new monster – reason.

It falters, it will always falter and you will never quite picture it the same way again. Over time it will change and it will leave you more confused, more hurt and more insecure.

But you will get out of it. You will learn. You won't lose that memory of 'love' but you will change.

You will grow up.

And once that happens, you will not trust your brain again. You will not trust the world again.

Even if you find someone better, even if you find something more pure, even if you find a world more blissful, you will reject it because you are too scared to get hurt the same way.
You don’t even want to acknowledge the possibility that it could be real, even if now it is.

So you will never love again.

You will never feel the same joy again (not even if you’re with friends and having the time of your life).

Because you are too scared to let yourself experience your own emotions.

You bent them.
You made them unbearable and yet,
you long for them.

So trust yourself again so you may trust the world again so you may trust that word again, or keep believing …

“One love is all we need.”



P.S. This post doesn’t reflect on my personal life. I had to point this out cause I know how we all like to think, “Oh! Poor guy, he’s fucked.”
Well I’m not. I gathered this understanding from observing some people around me, four to be exact.

P.P.S. I know what I ask of those ‘heartbroken’ people is not easy to say the least. I’m just trying to point out what I’ve noticed.
Also, I don’t listen to that song a lot.
Just saying.