Chemistry of Love

When I first met M, I was in college. She happened to become my closest friend in due course of time. She had a huge crush on a guy in her neighbourhood. She told me about all the dreams she wanted to fulfil with this guy. I sometimes felt that she is in love with the guy though she never declared it in exact words. One day, after class when we went to canteen to have a bite, she confessed her feelings and also described me a very grand preparation for proposing him. She was nervous and full of anticipation. Sometimes she was talking too much and sometimes fell silent. I tried to soothe her mental agony or excitement whichever way the readers might put it. I do not know if I was of any help. Since I am a person who thrives on romance, I really got enormously excited about the whole matter. Next day in college, I waited for her impatiently. She did not come for the first class, making me almost crazy in anticipation. I was not able to concentrate. The next class, she entered, looked at me as if trying to suppress her smile. She took the seat just next to me and in hushed tones half filled with shyness and half with triumph, told me that the guy had accepted her proposal. Her eyes were glittering with emotion. After the class we went to a coffee shop for elaborate discussions on the matter. She described the whole incident with such animation, that I truly envied her happiness. I kept thinking that M has got the true love of her life. Or was it true love? Or is true love and eternity of relationships a figment of our imagination. After one year she told me in the bus stop, while waiting for a bus to our college, that she is head over heals in love with a classmate of ours and wanted to break off with the neighbourhood guy. I was extremely perplexed. Before this I thought that she had received the love of the person whom she desired so much, then what went wrong? Why did she fall out of love?

I asked her the reasons for her sudden change in feelings. She told me in a guilty voice that she was not in love with him anymore, but she didn't know of any particular reason. She told me that she never realised that she was drifting away from him. When exactly she started feeling for our classmate was absolutely unknown to her as if some magic spell was put on her. Her eyes looked so helpless. Previously I used to feel that people who claim that they fell in love with somebody else while still being in a relationship were weak people with no strength of character. I believed them to be devoid of the ability to feel love in its true essence and lacking in devotion and commitment. But looking at her face I could not see anything of that sort. She was very much in love with our classmate, had the same glitter of emotion in her eyes for the guy promising all notions of commitment and devotion. She was ashamed of feeling that way, for another guy but her feeling itself had no impurity. She never wanted to betray anybody, but she had fallen in love even without taking her own conscious permission.

My theory of eternal love was shaken for the first time. Now when I look back after so many years and think with all other similar incidents acting as proof of my new theory, I feel wiser and less naive. I feel that we are like molecules which are in constant brownian motion and like molecules we keep bumping into different kinds of people. Sometimes we collide with people who catch our interest and we fall in love just like molecules undergo chemical reactions. How stable the newly formed compound is foretells the future reactions these constituent molecules might undergo. Similarly when two people form a relationship, the time for which they will be together depends on the depth of the relationship. Also in both cases the circumstances have a huge role to play. Whom will you meet next or how the same person you had loved so much will change with time or what unavoidable circumstances might pull two people apart are some of the reasons why love although still being an eternal feeling is non-existent for eternity.

This is a short love story from a spectator who is in love with romance. I have always thrived on drama and romance. I love to observe people in love and the way they handle their emotions. Some of these real life experiences have influenced my notion of relationships. There are many such short stories which are profoundly interesting and have excited imagination of all sorts.