My professors often advise me to fall in love. Probably because I talk endlessly about dry subjects, history, philosophy and the like, rarely allowing logic to leave the room. My ideas can seem divorced from human touch, even when they are full of intellectual rigor and academic footnotes. My professors grow tired of this mathematics. They want me to experience life while I remain determined to explore the atom.
So I took their advice. And I have a confession to make: I fell in “love”, or infatuation, or whatever it is that makes you smile for no apparent reason. Now I am left with the pain and emptiness that arrive when it ends. These, then, are the things I can point to as I try, predictably, to intellectualize that pain.
Recently, I hiked Mount Fuji. It was a bullet hike. I set out in the early hours, reached the summit, stayed there for a while, and began my descent before darkness made the journey more difficult. Before that, my last major climb had been Nanga Parbat in 2022, where I pushed through pain and exhaustion. My body begged me to stop, but I kept going.
In love, though, I cannot do the same. I cannot simply push through the torment and order myself to keep moving. I take great pride in believing that I can master my body, drive it beyond its limits, and prove that willpower is what ultimately matters. I have run a marathon and climbed mountains. Yet that same will cannot command this pain to disappear. Whenever I try to control it, I go numb. I begin living from second to second, fixing my breath on the next moment, almost forgetting that minutes, hours and days exist.
Love brings hope, but it also brings an extraordinary sadness. Somewhere between the two, you begin watching yourself change.
In love, you share music. You send the songs you like, the ghazals that soothe you, the instrumental pieces that carry you somewhere else. You offer these things to another person because you are trying to bring them into your inner world, to reveal something of yourself that ordinary conversation cannot.
Soon they become part of your taste itself. When you discover something new, perhaps a fresh rendition of an old classic, your first instinct is to send it to them. Then you part ways, and the playlist becomes empty. The same songs suddenly carry memories you would rather avoid. The headphones are on, but you are no longer really listening. You are trying to drown out happy memories that once belonged to two people and are now yours alone.
You hear a new rendition of Jagjit Singh and Rekha Bhardwaj’s Koi Faryad. Your hand almost reaches for the phone. Then you stop. You stop yourself, too, from telling her that you have started reading her favorite novel. You are not much of a fiction reader, but you have heard her speak so often about this particular book, about what it means to her, that eventually you pick it up. She is drawn to tragedy and suffering, and as you work your way through this obscure novel, you begin finding traces of her in its pages.
The tragedy she spoke about so often suddenly makes more sense. You see parallels between the novel and the person you knew. Once, you would have immediately told her about them. Now you keep those observations to yourself and bury them somewhere deep. Love brings hope, but it also brings an extraordinary sadness. Somewhere between the two, you begin watching yourself change. The personality you hold so dear was built out of painful lessons and years of standing against the wind. You took pride in saying what you thought without mincing words. Then suddenly you care about how your words might hurt someone. You begin speaking more softly.
Principles you once considered unshakeable begin falling, one after another, like a house of cards. You find yourself doing things that would once have seemed unimaginable. The ultimate tragedy is that you blush. And then, one day, it is simply over. You feel strangely alone in the world. The world was never a particularly large part of your life anyway, but somewhere across the seven oceans you had discovered a sense of belonging, a connection, perhaps even a small ray of hope. Now it is gone.
The vastness of the universe begins to feel oppressive. You try once again to divide seconds into microseconds so there is no space left in which to feel the agony. You want to course-correct, as though heartbreak were a navigational error. But there is no one with whom to share the pain. There is only you, the silence and the suffering. For a while you had known small eclipses of joy, moments when you smiled for no reason at all. Now the smile is gone. You try to summon it and cannot. Even the logic you once clung to so tightly seems to have deserted you.
So you gather whatever pieces remain and try to move on, because that is what life eventually demands. And perhaps, after everything, you return to the two things you knew before all this began: logic and poetry. To those who still dismiss love as a myth, I would borrow the words of Abdul Hameed Adam:
آپ پر بھی وار ہو دل کا تو پوچھیں آپ سے
عشق بیماری کا غلبہ ہے کہ افسانے کا نام
Had your heart ever been struck, I would ask you then: is love an affliction that overwhelms us, or merely the name of a tale?