The Fifth Dimension.

In Les Miserables, when Marius and Cosette confess their love to each other, here’s how it plays out.

Marius- Cosette, I don’t know what to say.
Cosette- Then make no sound.
Marius- I am lost.
Cosette- I am found.

When you love, you either lose yourself or you become the truest version of yourself. Does that make love the best or the worst thing we do? Somehow unbelievably and inexplicably, could it be both?
Love is the best of the worst.

For who fixes broken people? Is it not other broken people, ones who've already been ruined? It was the messiness and hurt in our pasts that drove us, and that same hurt connected us at a sub-dermal level, the kind of scars written so deeply in your cells that you can't even see them anymore, only recognize them in someone else. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is. So yes, love may take the shadows of our souls hostage, but in that lies our freedom.

Harry Potter taught us that love was greater than any spell and that it can defy all evil. Love can really conquer hate. That was when we were children (not that we are much older) but it is something that still makes sense, and right now, more so. Harry Potter was spared from an Avada Kedavra curse—and several subsequent wand matches with Voldemort—because of the love his mother Lily shielded him with upon death. This explanation doesn’t require a detailed equation or precise potion; we simply accept that love and magic are linked.

1 word, four letters, Love transcends time and space (enter Interstellar reference), saves humanity and becomes survival instinct. Cooper and Murphy’s love is love at its purest form. Maybe in that, love is the best thing we do, perhaps.

And somehow, it does seem sensible to believe in the fact that love could be the fifth dimension in which we flourish, in which we survive. In a way that neither the passage of time, nor gravity, nor data can achieve, love is the key to simply existing. Love shows us the path of transition from one blank space to another.

...Perhaps to the fifth dimension? Interstellar never explains how we become they. Perhaps it’s love that ushers us into a new state of being. Perhaps our future selves are able to finally grasp the breadth of love’s influence across all of the dimensions.

So yes, just like all the forces that make up our universe- love is yet another. Unstable just like all the radioactive elements we know, yet a stronger driving force than gravity ever could be. Love can be the best and the worst. Love can make us either the best or the worst versions of ourselves. And love is the best AND worst thing that we do.

You taught me well, Ted Mosby.


Bubbles of love,
Ankita.