Scathed love

When people say they are "in love" I didn't use to get it because I was never in love though I had some crushes on girls I was never in love. I was, in a weird way brainwashed to believe that love is the greatest feeling thanks to all the romantic Bollywood movies and all the couples who made me feel terrible about my single life. I think love is like if it's going to happen, then it will find its way through all the extremes and if it is not going to happen then any shoddy thing is enough to break it. Love is like a typhoon where you don't know how you entered it but you expect only happiness at the end of it. Then only two things will happen to you first, you will find your soulmate: the sole reason for your happiness or you end up with an inherent scarred heart. I never knew what love meant to me and all the people around me until I met her.   

Till the age of 19, almost at the end of my teenage I neither expected to have a girlfriend nor to be in love so when I was in love, it was hard for me to understand what's going on. I knew that I have entered the storm and either one of two things will happen to me. It happened in my Engineering degree with a girl in my class. It's really hard to describe what we had but it was damn complicated.  

So, this arc of my story began from the submission at the end of 4th semester where I met her and the tale of our friendship started. She was kind, caring, and had a very soft and sweet voice which I just wanted to hear all the time. With more time, the feelings in my heart also rose exponentially but I didn't have the slightest idea of what to do because I haven't had this kind of experience, and telling her what I felt was like there's just too much at stake. So, I did what every confused teenager does that is trying to be with her all the time and to spend most of my time with her.   

Part of me was very sure about the feelings I had but part of me was also not sure about the feelings she had. I tried convincing myself that maybe it's just attraction but it's been almost a year so I knew that it's not an attraction anymore and I have entered the storm and I have to move towards the end of the storm.  

There was a College Festival in my college which gave me that filmy romantic platform for confessing my feelings. So, I decided to do this in a typical Bollywood style by giving a rose to her. Everything was set and the plan was in action just one problem that was the timing. Somehow, I managed to get some alone time with her and gave her the rose and said one trash cheesy line which I thought worked but she had to go somewhere else and I couldn't talk to her but in my mind, I had come out of the storm with a victory and hardly knew what lies ahead for me and how it will change me forever.  

When I was going to my hostel, I saw her with another guy and a girl and I thought that it was just her friend and then after almost 2-3 days when we met, I was just full of joy wanting to meet her. I decided to have a romantic date with her but she told me that she can't come because she came with someone else and he was the same guy I saw so; I acted all cool and pretended that I'm alright. This was too much even for a person like me so, I decided to talk to her over the phone. Later that day when I talked to her she told me that he is her boyfriend who just proposed to her on the same day as me and she said yes to him. I was just numb and didn't have any words at this moment. Now she is also aware of my feelings for her but didn't want to hurt me.  

This was just a bummer for me and I didn't have the slightest clue what had just happened. I was the kind of guy who used to believe that if my love is true then the person, I love will fall for me no matter what and this scenario was totally out of the syllabus for me. In the movies, I saw since childhood this never happened in any of the films.  

I felt a deep void inside my heart that I couldn't fix it whatever I do. I started to think that 'LOVE' is just too overrated. As time went by and I come to know more about the real world which totally different and pretty harsh from the world I saw in movies. In movies, they always try to tell to keep trying but no one tells you to accept the fact and move on. In this period, I think I grew the most because this allowed to me know what love really is and why it is so convoluted and why people think it hurts. Love doesn't hurt we are the ones' who think that it will bring something that's missing from our lives and when it doesn't happen then we think that it hurt us  

For me, the person gains maturity when he knows that his heart is scarred but he doesn't try to clean it off. He understands that it is okay to have a scratch on the heart and knows how to live with it.