JUST ADD WATER

I spent some time with one of the people from work I'm closer to, Kyrene, and we talked about what we both thought of love. She said she doesn't really think romantic love exists, more of a convenient justification for people to marry one person and procreate/copulate. I am inclined to agree, I'm not sure I can see myself committing to one single person for a lifetime, and then we both read an article in which science says love doesn't exist. I told Lucas about the conversation I'd had with Kyrene. He knows, as it stands, that I don't even really know what love means, or I have a warped idea of it. The fact is I saw my parents in a turbulent relationship. While fighting, one parent would ask me to throw away something the other had bought for them as a gift, the other would tell me not to. Whichever side I picked, I would still be wrong and one would still end up angry at me. The next thing I knew, they would tell me they loved each other and loved me. So now I have to keep unlearning what I've been taught love was. I have to tell myself that drama does not mean love. I have to re-parent and teach myself that I do not have to love a distant/avoidant partner, one that I have to work and plead to receive attention from. Lucas knows all this, and we speak about all this, and he read yesterday's post and we talked about it and how it affected him. He said, of my conversation with Kyrene, that he's known for a long time that what we know as romantic love are just chemical reactions in the brain, mostly to perpetuate the human race and all that jazz. He said, still, that he knows he loves me, because he and I want the same things, that we believe and work for the same things, that he's always wanted a partner he could talk to like a friend. We sang karaoke, just Lucas and I. We are both not the greatest singers. In fact, that's being very nice to our egos. Neither of us sings well, but enclosed in a tiny space, we listened to each other's warbling voices. When I am at his place, we play Taboo and we have our own inside jokes, like all couples do. I don't claim to know what love is, most of the time I don't know what it is, but whatever I feel for Lucas, it is strong enough to keep me safe and protected for a long, long time, I hope.