Imagine the beginning of the season of spring- grounds blanketed with lush grass, bees humming about, birds fluttering in the soothing aqua skies. But the one aspect of spring that never failed to enchant me was the bursting of an inconspicuous, olive-colored, shrivelled bud into a flurry of vivid, fresh shades of color forming into a wonderful shape of a flower. However, once bloomed, the flower stays intact for a mere few days, before crumbling into nothingness – a pile of dried up petals which soon gets lost in the ground, while the rest of the world forgets the beauty that it had once possessed.

However, each person in the whirlwind of the 7.7 billion people on this planet has their own interpretation of love. Growing up in the world of stories, I learned the importance of love for the development of a plot at a very tender age of my life. It’s what made Augustus and Hazel Grace to stick with each other until the very end, it’s what motivated Lily Potter to give her life for her infant son, it’s what disturbed Jo March as she believed that love is nothing but a form of weakness for a person and it’s what brought together Macbeth and Lady Macbeth into blindly committing a crime that will usher in their destruction. As seen in these examples, in stories, love was portrayed as both- destiny and doom, and as a child, with an overbearing inquisitive nature, I always wondered which side of love to believe in.

Over the years, as I began to grow, and develop my own unique perspective, it also came to my attention how fictionalised the concept of love had been made with the help of the idea of Valentine’s Day. Through my teenage years, I have seen the feeling of love entirely become a marketing gimmick for several companies just to exploit this feeling into making a profit- as though ingesting a piece of chocolate is going to make people forget all care in the world and fall right in love with each other- if that miraculous a chocolate did exist, that would be all I would eat. By the creation and indoctrination of millions of such beliefs and ideologies, the very meaning of love itself has been diluted and many of us have forgotten what it truly is. Well, I’m here to try my best to express what it means to me.

The word love for all of us has developed into something which might only be considered for a romantic interest, but for me, it’s for anyone around who you do not have any need to hide your true self, around whom you feel at complete ease and who continues to give you that feeling of comfort, no matter what comes. The true feeling is the love we have for ourselves and this feeling is only felt for another person when that someone helps you reaffirm that self-love and makes you regain that sense of worth. This isn’t something that can be quantified by the number of roses one gets you. Rather, it is something that can be felt by the sense of ease and freedom that creeps into your mind once you are with them.

Therefore, this Valentine’s Day I ask you all to find that person or those people around who, you can be your real self – no restrictions, no masks. I ask you to find that person who makes the flower inside you bloom into the flurry of colors and does not let it diminish.

However, this is just one person’s opinion.