Love is fragile but can withstand blows; it is easily dismantled but can be unrelenting in its persistence. It can disintegrate in a word, but can stand unbreakable after the worst of happenstances.   Love is both ordinary and a maverick. It can breathe as if it is taking its last inhalation or linger as if infinity is a friend. There is lassitude, there is energy, there is determination, there is presumption. Of course we know when we are in love and when we are pretending: when we carry wounds like a fireball hidden inside. So much of love is the warmth of a glance as also the heartbreak of a look avoided.   The shadow of love is often fraught with short-term memory. We remember the last outtake, the last remark, the last deed. The fractured nature of our feelings, invariably, leads us astray into judging love as a finality, defined as that last piece of interaction, forgetting the warmth, the light and the wonder of what it meant for so long.   Of course, we drift, of course we are flooded, of course we are castaways in our own opinions, of course we are prisoners of minutiae, even as the big picture looms large beckoning us into its now-fading glory.   Our obsession with the now and the just-elapsed, makes us error-prone, subsuming us in its shallow currents. We lose the perennial for the ephemeral.   And even as we sit at the shore, we drown in innocuous backdrafts.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the way we romance rains and storms -  Dancing in the Rains Of Rain-Engulfed Rooms & Lovers in Spate Waiting for a Storm Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Artemis by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/Artemis Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license