Love is like the reflection you see on the surface of water. It looks exactly like a thing you already know. Something that looks and seems recollectible. But you cannot really touch it. You cannot really remember it in your heart. You cannot really feel it at will, can you? You feel something in your heart and your body. It is lust. You know it. When does that become love? And what are the signs? And how do you not confuse it with friendship or lust?

I have always been a believer in the notion that once you say the word Love out loud. You feel it in your 'Heart.' That it is that easy. But I am not sure anymore. What is love really. The stubbornness of the word is so confusing. It refuses to budge. It's as if it can have no other meaning. Is crush love? Is infatuation love? Or is love referring to something long-term? But then when at the onset one says “I have fallen in love,” how do they know it's long-term?

I still think of these things. Yes I am that juvenile. I feel so much. So passionate I am and so confused. So inward-looking. That I am constantly looking for a marker which will show me what love is. Purple for Love! Yay! Yellow for Crush and so on and so forth.

Recently, I had an amazing experience in love. With a man I frequently share my bed with. Who then leaves it by 3 or 4 so as to be back home before his mother wakes up. Whom I don't meet or call on Sundays and Mondays because those days his girlfriend has offs and he needs to be with her then. Yes It is very sordid. But we are friends first. And I am supposed to understand his busy schedule and he my lonliness and fears.

It gets murkier still. On my birthday, he couldn't come home for his ex-gf, my very close friend was to be there. She knows we used to be f@%* buddies, she doesn't know we are 'closer' still. So yeah. Dirty dirty things we are.

And of course, that it is supposed to be so covert is very exciting to me. Of course it is. To him too I suppose. And we have a nice stable relationship. Friendship it could have been called if there wasn't also tenderness/affection which usually translates into something sexual for me. For us. And yes the chemistry is good and familiar as it is something we have settled into over a couple of years.

For my birthday, he took me out on a mid-night drive. We drove to the airport. It was raining incessantly and visibility was low. And the road was almost never-ending. And in it we created romance. Out of the murk, out of the immoral we created romance. I sang songs, completely unselfconsciously. I rolled down the windows and caught raindrops in my mouth and my eyelashes. He looked on indulgently. I drove a little bit of the way, erractic; he sat well pamperd. We ate out of the same plate. And then I demanded cookies, he bought me two of everything. And we watched the rain together. Completely at ease with each other. Completely unconscious of the world around us. Seeing us, nobody would guess at the truth is a bit under the table, a bit tainted and not as wholesome as it seemed that night.

There was a cake for me. And gifts. In the car in the deserted parking lot of the airport miles away from the city, where we live a couple of lanes away. For afterall we are a secret. There was a cake for me and gifts and love and affection.

The drive back was more serene. A detour we made to the end of the world. For the clandestine and the sensual go hand in hand. The drive back was more silent. And I felt secure and cocooned in care and love. With the soft sleet of rain touching my palm and the wind moving my hand without my control, I murmured, “You love me.” Just like that. A statement. He stiffened. Remembering perhaps our earlier struggle with this word. But this love, the signs were so clear, that I had no qualms in saying it aloud. We share our lives – day-to-day, our thoughts, our pasts, our family troubles or love. We both pay attention to the smallest details of whatever the others say. And and ....and.... it is still sordid, murky or dirty to the world. For one is a coward, afraid of rocking the boat, afraid of having people hate him and the other relenting, lazy, believeing instead in the temporal.

And hence even though it is love. It is not. For we say it is not. And the reflection on the surface of water secretly distorts into the sordid, the murky and ......

"Really? Are you kidding me?"

It got to me at last. The ball dropped. Or am I being too severe on myself? So a girl gets horny. She does you know. But she doesn't necessarily want to 'do it' 'go all the way' with someone she doesn't know. Moreover the Need to be held and cuddled is just paralysing, but she can't gurantee just holding and cuddling will not arouse her. She gets aroused as hell. She can't help it. That is how she was made. But sometimes she can't go on with it. And she knows she doesn't have to. So she tells the man she is with, “No” “Stop.” And nothing in her past, filled with polite men, Men caring about her emotions and her personna, Men with whom she's shared a history, prepared her for the moment when when she had withdrawn and curled up and preparing to get dressed, to feel his penis trying to push past her objection, into her vagina.