The Scent of Love

Marriage is a demand of society, desire is a demand of passion, but love—love is the demand of the soul itself.

Love is that peculiar feeling where two souls become one. In this state, the person you love carries a piece of your heart within them, and unknowingly, a part of your mind flows into theirs. You might say that then, truly and completely, two people become each other's own. Not the cinema kind of "you are mine," but something equally real, drawn from life itself. In films and plays, such dialogues as "you are mine" are repeated endlessly to convey the romance of a scene, the pull between people, their affection for one another. But in reality, when you love your own person, there is no need even to speak those words, nor to hear them in return—because both of you already know the actual truth. This can be called "being bound by choice."

Their success becomes yours; equally, they become sharers in all your failures. In the end, love is simply an unwritten contract.

It seems to me that the entire journey of love is like walking across a trembling bridge. Imagine: one of the two, perhaps in some mischief, moves forward and shakes that bridge a little. Yet the person standing on the other side will close their eyes and walk across that swaying bridge anyway, even though they cannot swim! Do you know why? Because even without knowing how to swim, they know with absolute certainty that the other person will never let them fall—never, in any way. Or if they do fall from the bridge, there is surely some arrangement below that will ensure they come to no harm. If neither of these were true, the other person would surely shake the bridge. This is called trust.

In love, two hearts are bound together—not in one way, but in countless spirals, layer upon layer. In such a state, one feels the incorporeal presence of the other, hears the timbre of their voice, understands the language of their eyes, reaches out and caresses their cheek with tenderness. Many people search in the words, the bearing, the faces of strangers for echoes of the person they love—unknowingly, without intention—and many actually find them! 

In love, you lose many rights over yourself. Someone who never cared for rain comes to love being drenched in it three times over. A person to whom flowering vines seemed mere weeds discovers their beauty the moment they love someone! Yet rain and flowers were beautiful from the very beginning of creation; their eyes were simply blind to that beauty all this time. Love opens our eyes, and sometimes blinds them too. Love makes us do things, say things, think things we never imagined.

When you love someone, even your way of seeing changes. You will want to love yourself more deeply. Both laughter and tears will multiply. Unless you walk this path yourself, you cannot truly understand these things; and anyone who speaks of love's greatness will seem merely mad to you. But when you finally grasp the real truth, you will ask yourself: why did I not have the blessing of such madness sooner? Alas, those who cannot become mad in this way live such terribly unlucky lives! Such a life has no meaning at all.