“Are you in love?” is a question that baffled me, to go down my memory lane and introspect. Amused at the question hurled at me in the threshold of sixty I mused over it for a long time with a mischief in my heart.
My love story with cancer, the challenges last three years made me fall in love with myself. The creeping crab had brought out the real expressive me who loved nature from childhood, one who had a rare and special connect to trees and everything in nature. One who visualized all that I felt and read! It is the exuberance in me who always loved all innate and pristine things in nature with a passion.
That I had hidden myself in some remote corner of the mind, heart and soul; and the expressions of life though a born fighter and rebel. One who sacrificed everything for the love and welfare of my little family, I held dear. With the burdens and challenges of life one that started loving adversity, the land of unknown, one who feared nothing but held the values instilled by my parents as dear as life. The inevitable of life taught me the pain of loss and value of life; still never bothered about myself as I slogged for the family.
When the heart started racing faster than I could comprehend and landed me in the hospital bed that made me sit up and think, I realized it was time to quit and relax, still continued until my family doctor gave an ultimatum. The advice was to stop and relax.
Cancer was the best thing that happened to me. It made me what I am today, one with nature, loving everything about nature, one with a zest to still dare and challenge me as I used to as a child, an adolescent and a teenager until I got married. After that my life was not mine. It centered on many people. My joint family was my world, and later my little family. Life swept me along many paths but all for my family.
I believed firmly that a woman is like a river. If you are flowing within the boundaries then you are revered and respected. If you go beyond the boundaries it is like floods that can devastate and destruct.
Cancer made me love myself with all the passion in my soul and that took me through my fights of life. Yes I am in love with the real self who had loved to be with nature, the real me who was lost in the rat race of day to day living. I am in love with myself.

Love is a feeling I always knew,
The feeling that goes on in me,
About the me that got lost,
Somewhere in my life’s journey.

The purest gift not of money
That is inside my heart and soul,
With an undying passion,
Of the truest feelings.

I can’t exchange it for anything,
Nor let it fly away like a dove,
No matter what had happened,
I am in love with myself.