Love Is Friendship On Fire
"Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists. When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete, like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence."
--The Concourt Journals
~*~
This passage was read in a movie I discovered last night, Half Light. It's a thriller/tragedy type movie but I quite enjoyed it~ It's hard to try to describe what love is, especially to someone who's never experienced it, but that's a bit of it.
It's that feeling that when the person you love (or think you love) isn't there, you notice it. You feel a lack. I always imagine a relationship to be between two people who are best friends and can tell each other anything. So for me it would be not having my best friend there to turn to and say "hey wasn't that cool??" or just whatever random thought popped into my head. (I don't think I need to point out that I'm feeling this lack this weekend.)
I don't know if this would explain what love is necessarily, but it's a thing I notice when I'm in love with someone: You'll do just about anything within your power to make that other person happy. If they want cookies when they're sick and it's late at night and raining, you go get them anyway. If they want the last piece of taylor ham you give it to them. If having way home from the airport that doesn't include public transit is what they want, and you have to ask someone for a favor even though you hate asking people for favors, you do it anyway. It's simply seeing to that other person's happiness and putting their welfare above your own.
Carolyn and I were talking about The Little Mermaid the other day. Not the Disney version, the original. I myself have never read it, but she explained it to me (and from what I can tell the original is a far cry from the Disney version), and the way I gather it, in the end, the little mermaid (who remains nameless the whole story) learns to put someone else above her own self. She learns selflessness. That's love.
Note that doesn't mean you kill yourself. This isn't Romeo and Juliet. It just means you do what's within your power to do to make the other person smile. I realized this morning, as I was talking to Skippy about picking Angelo up at the airport Monday evening, that I would do just about anything I possibly could to see Ang smile. Just smile. I don't mean things that would make him say "thank you" or "I love you" or any other sweet thing. Just smile. To make his eyes light up and twinkle or hear him giggle...I'd do anything I possible could. Cheesy as this sounds, there really is no sight I enjoy more than seeing him smile. If he's not happy, I'm not happy.