Maybe it makes me strong; maybe it doesn't

"Love makes you strong; it makes you powerful". 

He said last night.

His words resonated in my ears like a shrieking yelp heard at the farthest end of a solitary street on a cold November night.  I looked into his eyes long and hard, gathering whether he really meant it. I looked into his soul, grasping for something to hold onto, tried to touch his words with my faltering gaze. 

He looked determined. He looked sure. He knew what he had said.

Suddenly I felt something crumble.

‘It is an act of rebellion against others. Others who were closer to you before that one person came along. It is a statement of strength; it liberates you from the shackles of some sort. And that is a threat to others, which is why it must be concealed and not spoken of.’  

Inside me, deep within the confines of the empty rooms in the house of my imagination, someone was constantly breaking dishes in a domestic brawl. The shouting echoed through the house, rattling everything it touched.  

One of those moments, when seconds look like centuries and everything you hold, everything you want, and everything you worked for – just disappears into thin air. Looking it was never there; looking like it didn’t exist and suddenly, you find yourself, on the wrong side of the fence.

I gather courage to mutter, first under my breath and then in flesh; ‘But love makes you weak… It never makes you strong.’

He seemed confounded. Perhaps he didn't know what was going on inside my head. Of course he didn’t know, how could he. He looked into my eyes, his turn this time. And replied, almost as quickly as my the first words he spoke. ‘But it does make you strong and powerful, of course it does. To the world, it does.’

I wanted to tell him. And suddenly I was lost for words. I felt foolish. Having felt all this in a few moments, and being unable to speak, my hands folded and my lips pursed; my mind gushing in a tornado of doubts.

Picking up ends to start from, writing a conversation in that brief moment of reprisal, acquiring courage somehow, fully aware of my receding defences, I went on.

‘Do you think sitting here in front of a man, who hardly knows what goes inside my head, confessing my love, planning a life ahead and doing things selflessly and unconditionally, makes me strong?’

He looked on incredulously as I moved my lips, as convincingly as I could.

Do you think claiming my unconditional love, denuding my emotional skeleton in front of another human, unaware and uncertain about how it falls down on your senses, do you think that gives me power? Do you think talking about spending a life with you, asking you if you really wanted to, imagining and planning day and night, putting up with every little doubt, every little insecurity and praying everything stays the same, that makes me strong?’

Realizing how his little act of rebellion had subverted the status quo in this equation, he fell quiet. Smiled, signaling the lack of an appropriate, more befitting gesture, looked over his shoulder and asked the waiter for another drink.