There are people who think love is a grand event. A confession in the rain. A wedding aisle. A hand held at the airport before departure. But most days, love looks smaller than that. Quieter. It looks like someone remembering how you take your tea after hearing it only once. It looks like forwarding a song because the lyrics reminded them of a sentence you said three months ago. It looks like your mother cutting fruit and leaving it near your laptop without saying a word because she knows you forget to eat when you are anxious.
And maybe that is why the world feels so unbearable sometimes. Not because life is inherently cruel, but because we keep brushing against the absence of love in ordinary places.
A cold reply.
An unanswered call.
An empty chair at dinner.
The silence after telling someone something that mattered to you.
Everything in life is about love. And when it is not, it is about the hunger for it.
Even ambition is just love wearing a suit and pretending to be practical. People work fourteen hour days not only for money, but because somewhere deep inside them is a child wanting to be seen. To be told, I am proud of you. We call it success because it sounds less vulnerable than saying please love me enough to notice my effort.
Loneliness is not sitting alone in a room. Loneliness is making a joke and realizing nobody knows your humour well enough to understand you were serious underneath it.
You can see it everywhere if you pay attention.
The old man at the grocery store who starts conversations with strangers because his wife died years ago and silence has become too loud in the house.
The friend who keeps posting online because they are terrified of disappearing quietly from everyone’s mind.
The person who says they do not care about relationships anymore but still checks their phone at 2:13 in the morning hoping one particular name appears.
Even anger is often wounded love. Nobody becomes bitter without first caring too much.
A child slamming a door because their father missed another school play.
A woman saying she hates romance because she once waited for someone who never arrived.
A man becoming emotionally unavailable because the last time he opened up, somebody used his softness against him.
People do not become hard naturally. Life dries them out slowly. Like wet clothes forgotten on a terrace for too many summers.
And still, despite everything, human beings continue reaching for one another in the smallest ways.
We send reels.
We wait for replies.
We save seats beside us.
We type “reached home?” after midnight.
We cook extra food hoping someone stays a little longer.
We replay voice notes after heartbreak because hearing someone laugh once loved feels better than silence.
Even grief is proof of love having existed. Nobody mourns what meant nothing.
Maybe that is why certain cities feel lonely. Certain homes feel cold. Certain songs feel like they are touching bruises inside you. Because love is not decoration in human life. It is infrastructure. It is electricity behind the walls. You only notice it fully when it is gone.
A person can survive without love the same way a plant can survive in a dark room for a while. Technically alive. Quietly dying.
And maybe the strangest thing is this:
people spend their whole lives looking for love while constantly creating it for others without realizing.
The cashier remembering your usual order.
Your friend sending you a blurry moon picture because they knew you would like it.
Someone moving to the safer side of the pavement while walking with you at night.
Your father pretending he does not understand technology just to keep asking you for help because it gives him reasons to talk to you.
Love has never only been romance.
It is attention.
It is remembrance.
It is making space.
And the absence of it explains almost every sadness we carry.
Maybe that is all life really is in the end.
A long search for places where we can soften without fear.
-aaditya
Aaditya Bajpai 