My friend came to me today with a story she had written sometime before. She wanted a feedback on it. The feedback I gave was in the form of huge drops of tears down my cheeks. It was a simple, yet touching story about a girl who never gets to know that the man she loves is no more, and is forced to believe that she meant nothing to him.

I don’t know why I felt so bad reading the story. It reminded me of what my best friend told me about a friend of his who was in love with a guy for eight years or so, got engaged with the blessings of both the families and were engaged for another eight months. And seven days before the wedding, the guy left her forever in an accident.

In fact, ever since my friend told me about this incident I’ve had a lot of thoughts in my mind. And today reading this story brought all those back and had me thinking – “What exactly is love?”

I’ve seen a lot of people cry and worry about their relationships which did not work out. I have done that myself. Worse yet, I’ve seen people cry and worry about being in love with someone who doesn’t reciprocate the feeling. I hate to admit it. But yet again, I’ve done that as well.

Now when I think of it, it was all so stupid and meaningless. We all do that at one point or the other I guess. We glorify the term “love” and try to convince ourselves that what we feel is the purest and most sacred form of love. We go on displaying all sorts of emotional gimmicks to support this notion. Looking back at myself and others, the only question I have is – “Why? Was it ever worth it?” We complain and crib about something that was never meant to happen, something that was never really there and something that we chose not to have in a way.

And then there are people who fought against all odds and stood by each other through thick and thin for their love – people who promised each other they would always be together, people who would have done anything in the world to keep that promise, people who knew what love is and did not need to show it off to convince each other how deep their love was – but people who never really got a chance. They didn’t ever need an option when it came to life, but never got an option when it came to death – people who were ripped apart by whatever we call “fate” or “destiny”, people who would have done all that they could to be with each other, but had to watch their life being snatched away from them.

Yet, after all this, they live – without any complaints, without any regrets, happy about the fact that they were in love, happy about the fact that they would always be in love no matter how far their loved ones are, knowing they would never see them, feel them or be with them. When they do that despite all the pain, we should probably be ashamed of crying about the choices we made or the ones we didn’t make. And that, I believe, has kind of put me in perspective about a lot of things and given me a very fresh outlook of life. I hope I don’t disappoint myself by going out of track ever again. I hope none of us do.