my definition of love

i’ve read books about love.
i’ve written about it quite a lot of times as well. but more than anything, i’ve thought about it a trillion times.
and yet when someone asked me how i would define it, i fell silent.

may be i do know it in its bits and pieces.

may be i do realize what it means, only in fragments, scattered across my heart and head.

but when i was asked to pull all those broken, missing pieces together: i forgot the whole picture.
i felt like i knew nothing. yeah, i’ve never failed but perhaps, i think i’ve failed for the first time today.

so, i would ask this question again-

what is love?

is it a person you cannot forget?

or is it an emotion you cannot suppress?

is it a possession you still hold onto,
even if it wasn’t yours to begin with?

or is it a season that overwhelms you,
reminding you of a feeling that is hard to decipher?

or may be it is a day when you cannot stop yourself
from thinking about someone?

perhaps, love is none of these things.
or all of these things.

a person.

a feeling.

a memory.

a day.

a season.

a scent.

all of them.

every little remnant of someone you cannot cease to forget.

i don’t think there’s a wikipedia verified definition of love.
it’s something that we learn overtime and everybody learns to recognize it in their own way.

for a mother, the ambit of her love may be her children.
for a wife, the ambit of her love may be her husband.
for a child, the ambit of love will be his/her parents.

but for a poet, the ambit has no such boundary.

it’s not confined to one feeling, or one person.
it stretches across the entire universe of things that make love what it is, brick by brick.

it’s not merely whom i love,
but everything within me that makes me capable of loving someone.

loving someone doesn’t refer to the desire to possess.

it’s about caring for someone from distance, if it ought to.

love can look like remembering the little things someone mentioned, the things they probably even forgot they ever told you.

it can be being curious about them—not just by wanting to know the person they are today, but the person hidden beneath their habits, their contradictions and wondering why they are the way they are, what made them this way and what they carry within themselves.

may be love is wanting to know someone in their entirety, not just the parts that are easy to know or easy to assume.

the relentless yearning, the relentless curiosity, the relentless ache, the relentless remembrance, the relentless waiting

may be love was never about the typical ‘i’d die without you’
it was about loving someone expecting nothing in return, no rewards, no reciprocation.

it’s not the dramatic ‘butterflies in the stomach’ or the filmy obsession that we’ve always seen.
it’s something so pure that it’s more felt than seen.

and it’s more understood than expressed, in the interstices, in the narrow gaps that we fail to notice.
it breathes in the pauses, in the little things that fall into oblivion, and in the things that only the third person can tell.

and the irony? i still find myself falling out of words.

what i do know is that love was never about describing it in a book or a verse as well. yeah, ironical, coming from a writer herself.

i think it’s a language of its own that you spend your whole life deciphering.
i hope by the end, i’ll know the answer by heart.

WORDS FROM 3RD JUNE 2026 (SOURCE- my notes app)

it’s in the littlest things that you find the abundance.
people talk so highly of love, rather it’s so simple.

it’s the language of of its own— the language of love.
a language that transcends visibility, a more intimate form, which can be felt in the most precious way.

i wish people didn’t complicate it so much.
i wish people didn’t sexualize love.

love, is so pure. always has been.

it has always been the loudest in its quietness. we were only taught to listen for something, conventionally louder.
don’t mistake noise for love.