To love is to feel pain,

What is love if pain is non-existent?

People say that heartbreaks are part of living the life you’re in, it is part of human experience to feel the pain — of love, of friendship, or of a family.

But no one had warned me about the pain of only loving genuinely, well, genuinely that it might drown the person I love.

If someone asked me how fishes don’t drown in water I would answer, “Because it is their habitat, their nature and how their body is structured to function only underwater.”

But what if those fishes are laid down on solid ground? Would they die? Would they struggle? Would they beg to go back to the water?

Yes. Definitely.

When we build relationships with people, especially romantically, it isn’t their nature to feel our care, our love, or how we show our little admiration to them — how we would go lengths for them.

It might be a new, unfamiliar environment for their soul. It might take time for them to get used to it, or it might never. It might be not the one they’re seeking, or it is. And it might not be the one where they will find this abode of your love comfortable, or one dare would deem that it is their solace to feel your embrace.

It is two sides of a coin to make a person get used to how you make them feel that you really love them.

But what if my side didn’t fall on how I wanted it to be?

Well then, this is for you.

To love is to feel pain is basically loving through feeling the pain of knowing — knowing your place.

When you know that you have settled yourself in one person, making them your place, and your constant. It isn’t your fault that you chose that person, and they didn’t choose you to be theirs. It just happens that they can appear extremely comfortable within your presence, that you failed to notice how they don’t really love the place.

Then again, questioning of your worth comes to the scene. It can’t be helped.

And you asked them,

“Am I worth it?”

“Am I enough for you?”

“Do I need to tone down?”

“Do I need to add more?”

That you failed to notice yourself slowly falling to the brink of an idea — they must feel comfortable with me so they’d choose me every time.

But are you comfortable?

Do you feel serene around them?

Do you think you deserve this?

All questions dawned on you, asking multiple why’s, asking the validity of love — but to tell you truthfully, love is not about its authenticity, but love is about its reciprocity.

How were you to know that not all hearts beat the same?

It might be faster, slower, or just stable. It just happened that the string of hearts you both held didn’t meet halfway.

And just like how fishes can stay alive in water but would die on the ground.

We can stay alive in only our habitat, or something that we are used to feeling, comfortable — and would die in an unfamiliar embrace of a soul.

We are not fishes.

Hence we have the ability to drown ourselves in deep waters and the rationality of saving ourselves from drowning. We can be two ways. Complex. Difficult.

Painful.

To love is to feel pain,

But to love is not all about pain.

And if pain is non-existent,

There would still be love.