Dispatches from Nowhere 02.15.06

Baby, I’m sorry. I know I’m late and I missed Valentines Day. I was working.

I know. I say that all the time. But it’s true. No, I’m not writing somewhere else. I wouldn’t go behind your back like that. I respect you too much to treat you that way.

So what was I doing if I wasn’t writing somewhere else? I was working for the Spotsylvania sheriffs office. I was helping bust a prostitution ring.

Give me some sugar baby. Yeah, that’s right.

Let’s get to work.

So what is love?

I know. How typical of a question can you ask on Valentine's Day?

I should be up here ranting about the commercialization of love and the way the particular holiday is used by card, chocolate and confections manufacturers, lingerie boutiques, and every other business as a way of boosting the bottom line in the otherwise slow month of February.

You know what though? I can't be bitter about this exercise in commercial overdrive that claims to celebrate the affairs of the heart. I have lost all my "indy" cred. I have a steady date.

So, what is love?

Remember that initial infatuation that you felt when you first met? That warm fuzzy feeling wherein you can't think about anything other than that person and how nice they smell and how soft their lips are. New relationships have “The Glow". You know what I am talking about. The other person can do no wrong, you never fight, you never fart, all the little quirks are endearing instead of irritating and you fuck like monkeys on meth.

Well, maybe not meth. But you still have wild animal sex.

That lasts for, what?

Three weeks?

Three months?

Somewhere along the journey you realize that you might have let one slip and those quirky little habits that you found endearing are really annoying. You have your first fight and your first bout of makeup sex. You find out that he likes eggs in the morning and you are really just want coffee and a bagel.

So you move from infatuation to “I like this person a lot” and you spend more time together. You stay in for dinner, go out to meet each other’s friends, maybe take in a play or a concert. You go for long walks on the beach and talk about your hopes, your dreams and begin to open up emotionally a little bit just to see if the other person is there with you. If you are still in college, you hold each other’s hair and try and avoid the splash back of the thunder-chunder. Then you have wild monkey sex.

You spend more time together and fight some more. This is normal. You are encroaching on each other’s boundaries. Like all boundaries, there is war when they need to be readjusted. So you fight and adjust and you fight and adjust. Then you meet the family.

Could anything be more terrifying? A new set of parent to judge you and you have to live up to their expectations, of which you have no idea what they are? That just isn’t fair. You feel nervous. You can’t eat. You keep asking yourself “what happens if they don’t like me?” Don’t worry about it. They will love you. You are charming and lovely.

The parents do love you and now you are shopping for sweaters together and you wonder why you were ever worried about parents at all. It is way more trouble to find a sweater that fits and goes with the awesome jeans you just got on sale.

Then it hits you. Your stomach drops and the floor feels wobbly under your feet. It feels sort of like a semi-truck crashing at full speed into one of these gravel-braking pits you occasionally see on the side of the road. It is the realization that you might have feelings that could, very possibly, be classified as love.

Maybe.

OH GOD. What do you do now?

You don’t want to be the first one that says it. You don’t want to make everything all weird. What is they don’t feel the same way? You like the wild monkey sex and would miss it if it went away. Then, one day, it just happens.

I know. You didn’t mean to. It just sort of slipped out. You meant to say “Could you pass the orange juice?” and it came out “I love you”.

It took ten whole minutes to clean up the orange juice.

Is that love?

Is it the realization that you don’t want this person to go away? Do you find that when you think about the future, this person is there? Well, Nine years in and I still feel this way. I wonder how I got lucky enough to have some that supports me and helps me clean up the orange juice, and the cereal, and the toys and and and the list goes on.

It is not all a bed of roses. Sometimes, I don’t feel the warm fuzzy feelings that people seem to associate with love. Sometimes it feels more like a hanging out with my very best friend than a "relationship". Sometimes we fight. Sometimes we have those little moments of "The Glow" that remind us of why it is that we first got together. We still have wild monkey sex. Maybe not as often as we might like, but sometimes it happens.

For me, it boils down to this: I can’t imagine a future with out her next to me. I don’t know that it gets any simpler than that.than that.