When I was a kid, I wondered why people torture themselves in the name of others. I wondered why a person feels obsessed with another person who is neither a family member nor a relative by blood. I saw people mourning over the lost love, people spending time persuading someone who has already left them, have moved on, and who will never return to their life again. I couldn’t understand why people were unnecessarily making their life miserable.

I never found the answer to such questions until I became the victim of the unrequited love myself. I realized it is the battle of forgetting against the memory. The more you try to forget the past, the more difficult it becomes for you to live a happy life. It is never easy forgetting the person with whom you have spent the best time of your life.

For the first few weeks after the breakup, I felt like crying, nothing in the world fascinated me, I almost lost my faith in everything — poetry, writing, reading, arts, friends, sports and even life, and I began to grow more cynical and critical of the world around me. I shared my story with the colleagues at the office, and with some of my close friends, and all of them suggested me to forget her completely. It is the same suggestion I would have given to them if I were the listener of the story, but only the sufferer knows how difficult forgetting someone is.

Love and affection increase with the realization of someone’s absence. Instead of forgetting, I started loving her more than ever, and the tiniest hope that she will be back to my life again forced me to try to persuade her. I stalked her on social media, texted her, called her and hoped that one day, everything will be all right. She had already moved on, and all my attempts were meaningless and futile. With every failure in persuading her, I lost a lot of my self-esteem, and I began to feel worthless.

The realization that the person you love doesn’t love you in return, and loves somebody else, diminishes a lot of the confidence, dignity, and composure, and often you are unable to behave like a normal person. My suffering continued for almost one and half years until one day, I decided to leave everything behind and write seriously. I am not a good writer, but writing is an act that has given me a lot of pleasure, and more importantly, has filled the vacancy in my heart created by her throbbing absence.

When I am writing, I feel I am not alone. I feel, somebody else — at least one or two of them — will be reading the lines I am scribing in my tiny computer. Although it is not perfect and of the best standard, I feel it is a divine act to perform. It has at least created a readership in a very small scale. I have a sense of completeness and feeling that everything is under my control. This perhaps may be different, but a blissful and eternal form of love.

Time is so powerful that it heals even the deepest wounds. I owe a lot to time and the friends around me who backed me up in a very difficult time. I sometimes, still remember her, but I have realized, the act of remembrance is natural and obvious, and this is no longer painful to me.

Different people act differently to unrequited love. Some shameless people find an evil medium like physical attack or any other denigrating act to imposingly justify their so-called “true love”. Some are brave, they easily forget him or her, find a new one in their life, and live a happy life, or at least try to. Some are despondent and are stuck with the same person, and they either continue making their life miserable or find a meaningful medium to engage themselves and heal the wounds of the past. The entire healing process is timely, painful and melancholic, but it unfolds and reveals the greatest truth of life that happiness lies within us, and making somebody else the center of our happiness is merely an illusion and nothing else.

Every time, I think of unrequited love in general, it reminds me of the epic lines Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote in one his greatest works, "Love in the time of Cholera":

“It was inevitable. The scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”