What Is Love?

I don’t know if one can see love and I can not be certain over if one can taste it either, but I believe that it is what one wishes to see or is able to imagine, and thus only few of us ever find the privilege to make its acquaintance. It has learned how to walk so silent like a shadow among us, tiptoeing under the veil of the morning mist dressed in nothing but dew pearls entwined in its locks. Or it blows in gently through the open windows to our foolish hearts like summer breeze wearing a necklace with sweet wild strawberries and making us all, young and old, playful and naughty from inside to out like in A Midnight Summer Dream. It hides itself in the green meadows where the rivers are so lazy that they hug every curve, and spends days dancing through the waves of tall grass giggling as it tickles its toes. It will race over slippery rocks with the babbling streams that slither like snakes through deep forests, and play peek-a-boo with flickering sun in the groves full of berries. It will wander beneath the alleys of age-old pines jumping over the moss-covered stumps, run over the cloudberry marshlands soaking its feet in the croaking bogs, as well as over the countless fields of wheat and rye grass braided to a quilt that is sewed to the horizon. It will run and run like any mischievous child would without stopping for a breath of air, because it is young in heart like any love is and always will be, therefore so difficult for us to catch and see.
Then there are also those moments in our lives that don’t seem to have end, and where we find ourselves so grown into rose vines that their fragrance has put us into reverie. Oh yes, love can bind us in so many ways as it makes us speechless by swallowing all the letters or blind by distorting what our eyes could see. You can never really be quite sure if you are in love and not just imagining of everything that its lips blow to air. You start to wonder if love can make you believe in fairies or the magical beings who are the purest of all? And the answer would be,” Yes, it can,” and even though you would never get a chance to glance at one or find yourself stepping into the fairy circle under the ancient oak - the belief of their magic is what preserves their existence and fools your eyes to see things that only young ones do. Because, once you fall in love your mind flies to the enchanting world of make believe with gracious princesses, silvery unicorns and white knights who are always there to slay the fire- breathing dragons and kill the hungering giants to save their ladies of dreams. And you can call it a doing of Cupid’s arrow or fairy dust, but love makes you believe in fairytales from the wise nightingale whose songs saved the emperor’s life to A Thousand and One Arabian Nights.
Love makes us all grow backwards and tells the time to cease for uncertainty. Everything becomes like a dream in the never-ending book that gets thicker day by day as the author’s fantasies create new chapters. Imagination is a wonderful thing to have and one needs to learn how to appreciate it, because sometimes the life by itself can get lost in the dark caves and unknown valleys where you can feel so alone that it squeezes your heart to a tiny speck, and you wonder if you have been blown out of glass since everyone seems to look right through you.
That is what love is all about, giving the wings to your passions and desires, and letting them fly freely over seven seas and seven mountains until they reach the far away land that no one has ever seen before - only your imagination knows what it looks like and which scrumptious fruits you can pick, although the story itself is always a mystery that evolves as it flows in the endless river of amoré. Even if someone would choose to write down the words that give current to that river they would not make any sense, because the sentences would be like strainers leaking drop by drop as your feet are lifted off the ground and your head is spellbound somewhere in the puffy clouds. And one day when you fall back to the earth you are banned from judging its ways or trying to interpret its feelings, because every day it will choose to dress up into different colors of the ray that not all of us can see the same way.
It is sad how as we get older we occasionally become so ignorant over something that is so beautiful - as only love can be. On the other hand maybe it is not the lack of noticing its presence in our hectic lives, but rather our unconscious way of trying to protect us from feelings and emotions that are born with that kind of intoxication. Sometimes we are so scared of its taste that we would much rather hide ourselves between cold concrete walls or behind bamboo blinds than give it a chance to spice up our short lives. And love most certainly has so many tastes to flavor our world that it is impossible to describe every single one of them even with the most meticulous à la carte. You can be more than sure that it will never be dull or tedious in any way. Some days it can be sweet like crème brûlée with brown sugar crystals or melt like chocolate truffles in your mouth. While other days it can be bitter like dandelions or entirely sour like green apples that are too young to pick. But whatever taste it has, once you’ve had a privilege to feel its sweetness tingling on the top of the tongue you can never imagine life without it and will thirst for it as long as you live.
However, like everything in life, so does love work in mysterious ways, as one day you realize that what you thought to be love really was just a beautiful daydream. Something that you yearned for so much that it blurred the reality, and the truth is also that it would be very difficult to exist with your head in the clouds all the time. So you tell your conscious to be ignorant to the scents and emotions of this colorful world and choose the ordinary instead. And, even though it feels like giving away your heart to the snow queen piece by piece, your wisdom tells you that it is the right path do take. That love is not living in the world full of butterflies, but choosing to go home to the person who is waiting for you there and wishes to sit next to you by the end of the night. It is fighting over stupid things in life that nobody else cares about and then making up afterwards; learning to be there for someone else through pain and happiness; or growing the patience to accept them with their faults and weaknesses. It is making a choice to care more about someone else instead of yourself, and if you are really lucky it will grow little hands and tiny feet that want to crawl on your lap as the sun is falling into its fiery bed. Their big eyes will make you the center of the Universe and beg you to tell one more fairytale before the millions of kisses for good night.

Häly Laasme