It was the last day of 2013 and I was celebrating it with my BOYFRIEND.
It was nothing fancy, just a few friends gathered at my flat and cheap champagne drunk at midnight on Tower Bridge, under a miserable cold rain.
With elongated necks trying to see the fireworks taking place behind the bend of the river, I reflected upon the ending year. The year I gave myself an ultimatum to find true love. The year I found love…
I had challenged myself to do everything differently that year and instead of desperately and aimlessly zigging and zagging my way into ending relationships, I stayed the course.
I wish I could say I did it all alone, but the truth was love found me because I listened to those who proved to be instrumental in my story, like helpers from magical fairytales. My only merit was that I had asked for help and I was open to it when I received it. I had launched a wish into the ether that year and everything that had happened to me had been, in a way, some sort of miracle. I decided to take control over the most incontrollable thing in life, love, and instead of controlling it, I learnt to let myself be guided on the path to finding it.
There had been a few important lessons I learnt that year. It had been a coming of age year, a year of opening up to the possibilities of the world, a year in which I broke the curse of limitations and I began to harness the powerful forces at play, the creators of life.
If there is one thing I took away that year was this: love is matter of acceptance and, like anything else in life, love is a gift that you receive when you are ready for it. I took myself on a journey, just like the character in Paulo Cohelho’s ‘Alchemist’, looking for a treasure only to find that it had been inside of me all along. But it wasn’t until I completed my ‘romantic pilgrimage’ that the gift of love was revealed.
“Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it,’ said Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray Love. ‘You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.”
I was there, next to the man I loved and everything was right with the world.