What is real and just a dream?

(yeah baby, I know you're going to read this.)

I am waiting for tonight
then waiting for tomorrow
and i am somewhere in between
what is real
and just a dream

- Lifehouse, "Somewhere in Between"

Chris and EK are deep in one of their interminable discussions while I'm on the other side of the table with a few other girls chatting. JB was here a while ago but left to catch the bus. It's gotten to the point where JT's whipped out her cross-stitch project. She leans across AM and whispers, "I'm sorry, but I just don't like hearing your boyfriend arguing."

Come to that...yet another one of the weird things about our relationship is that I can't stand people who talk a lot.

Look across the table at them - two skinny intense guys wrapped up not only in the thing they're talking about, but the footless dance/swordless duel of a good argument. Me, I've got limited stamina for that sort of thing.

For those people out there who ask why I'm dating this guy, you've gotta ask who's going to put up with a girl who has the temperament of a mad scientist and the attention span of a hyperactive kitten. "There's someone for everyone," an acquaintance of EK's said when told he had a girlfriend...and is that a compliment or an insult?

A while ago, one of the older grad students at church scolded me for dating someone who's very clearly not interested in becoming a Christian (she's since apologized for being harsh and self-righteous, which I'm very glad for since she's otherwise a nice person and I didn't want to hate her). To stem the tide I said "If it makes you feel better, a) my parents know about this, I tell them what's going on in my life, and b) it's only a temporary relationship, since he's going back to New Jersey and I'm going back to Malaysia in August."

She folded her arms and said, "You say it's 'only temporary', so you're using him."

That was a Stephen Maturin moment. It took all my strength to not throw down my cup and walk out of that coffeeshop like Stephen did in Desolation Island where an ill-informed official all but calls Diana a slut to his face. (Haven't yet gotten a hold of the book where Diana dies...I'm rather afraid about what that's going to do to him.)

Afterward I wondered what that had been so particularly unbearable, aside from the obvious slur on my own character. Then I realized that I hate to think that I'm using someone I care about.

And also, perhaps because in the beginning I was 'using' in a way - trying to find friends in a new town, to relieve the boredom of being a grown-up now with a 9-to-5 job, experimenting to see what casual dating was like - but...

"When my parents first asked about you I told them I was dating you just for fun, not for serious."
"Are you dating me just for fun?"
"Not any more...what do you think?"
"I think it's somewhere between for fun and serious."
...and we're wrapped up in each other, and I'm warm.

I'm a taxonomist of emotions; I like to be able to name things, label them so that I have a handle on what goes on in my heart. Otherwise I don't deal well with them - like Seven of Nine emerging from her submersion of identity in the Borg Collective and learning to be human, I'm emerging from the silent time in my mid-teens when I could not speak, could not have friends, didn't understand how people worked. Sometimes I'm not sure how to label things properly.

I love my father and mother and sisters and brothers without qualification. I love most of my extended family to the first degree, some cousins especially. I love my friends, from school and college and Phases. Sure. But I'm shy to say that I love another person in that very specific way that you know people mean when they have to ask.

I've only ever said the words to one other person outside my immediate family (David, "beloved"), and that as it turned out was a mistake. This is not the right place for me. When I realized that my preference to return to Malaysia was taking on the compelling sense of a mission, a vocation, I knew that I couldn't fall in love again with anyone here - not into that emotional bond so intense that its imperishability almost takes on the weight of objective fact.

Let me clarify: This isn't to say "oh I am scarred and shall never love again" in some idiotic melodramatic fashion, but simple pragmatism, that for the sake of whatever hypothetical person's future happiness, and for my own, getting attached, permanently attached here would be a silly idea. The Pacific is a wide ocean to ask someone to cross - in either direction - for just one other person's presence.

It may be, however, that I'm trapping my emotions in a cage of semantics by insisting on so narrow a definiton of eros (in the Lewisian sense; I'm trying to get through this blog entry without using the word romanti - oh buggerit!) is keeping me from saying something I otherwise would.

What is love? The "love is patient, love is kind..." Pauline litany always comes to mind. But I'm impatient. I can be cruel. I...would like to hope that this is not what others see in me, but I see it in myself.

What is love?

"Is there anything you'd be willing to die for? Like freedom of speech or something?"
"If you mean a hundred percent chance of dying, no. A ninety-nine percent chance, maybe. I wouldn't do something if death was absolutely certain. True love is when there's a ninety-nine percent chance."

...okay. I can.

And I know you're going to read this and think, that's only because you believe that your imaginary friend is going to give you an afterlife anyway...but I would. Hey baby.