My Country: For Sri Lanka

(This was written as a Facebook status on the occasion of Sri Lanka's Independence Day 2015, a manifestation of something I had been doodling for a while and had become what you will read below)
The future of our nation lies in our hands.
If someone were to ask me what is the most impassioned and complicated relationship I have in my life – the answer is the one I share with my country.
She is like a lover who hurts me time and time again, but whose inner core I know is capable of the purest love and so I refuse to depart.
She is like a spoilt babe, whose stubbornness and tantrums that destroy lives I know is partly my fault because when she turns her face, kisses me and begs forgiveness instead of punishment – I yield.
She is like the parent that by example sometimes fails to teach me important lessons about values and greed – but who has loved me, and nurtured me from the start.
She is like the growing teenager that I chastise repeatedly but cannot bear to see others do the same. It doesn't matter to me in my blindness that they too were a part of her infancy and childhood, and that because they have new children in adulthood the relationship doesn't cease to exist. I fail to realize this and flare up when they chastise, forgetting that sometimes they too want what is best for her.
She is more beautiful than any I have ever seen, she is my home, she is my identity and she knows I could never be happy without her.
But I know that what she is, and what she will become is not in her hands – it is in ours. Because true, unselfish love means that you have to do what is right and not what is simply convenient.