By: Monaliza Viktoriya

Love. The most talked about, written about, topic of all time. Shakespeare wrote many beautiful plays about it, but did he really know what he was writing about? Did he write from personal agony of heartbreak or was it just his fancy to write a silly play about forlorn lovers torn apart by fate? After all, his famous quote rings true for so many of us, “The course of true love never did run smooth.”  I’ve been inside the Shakespearean plays, the heroine who makes those difficult choices, who doesn’t get her happy ending, whose fate does not work out in her favor, but in pain and sorrow of good bye. Most of my “relationships” weren’t even relationships, they were emotional entanglements of circumstances that never worked out, emotional “affairs” of the heart that weren’t even real affairs. I seemed to always have “circumstances” beyond my control that dictated the outcome of the situation and I felt like an outsider observing from above how my heart was getting broken into a thousand pieces and all I could do was watch it like a bad play that you wish ended differently, but you weren’t the playwright, and so you just watched as an audience member, present, but afraid to participate. Fear. Fear has a lot to do with love. Maybe in some instances it was fear that made me the unwilling audience member in a terrible play or maybe, just maybe they were just experiences I chose to experience for the highest evolution of me.  It’s what I needed at the time. Perhaps. Perhaps not. I’ll never know why it never worked out with this person or why I loved that person and why it couldn’t be different with all of them.

Why, why, why, an endless array of whys, but at the end of all the whys, there is one universal truth. Love is complicated in its simplicity. Love is not just jumping with someone into bed or making all your sexual fantasies come true. It’s so much more intricate and delicate than that.  It’s loving someone from afar as they hug their significant other you happened to introduce them to at a party. It’s watching someone sing their last song in dedication to you on stage before a final painful good bye. It’s getting on that plane and leaving, hoping you’re doing the right thing by giving them a chance with someone their age. It’s choosing all the wrong things for yourself in hopes to make someone happy without you. It’s terribly painful and deeply satisfying all at the same time. Just don’t allow the whys of it all get to you. Make sure those choices are right in that moment, even if it’s the most painful and brave decision of your life because really in life not many things are more heartbreaking than letting people you love go, by choice, pretending you’re doing the right thing or perhaps actually doing it. Painful lessons, perhaps, but so important, and at the end you get to your rainbow, you get the juicy slice of your favorite pie with ice cream on top, you get to have your happy ending. Perhaps J.M. Barrie said it best, who also happens to hale from the British Isles, ” Let no one who loves be unhappy… even love unreturned has it’s rainbow.”