In Continuum.

I haven't been in a lot of relationships, but I suppose I had the privilege to experience love at first hand, and drew my own very naive conclusions as to what it was. It was when I was inches away from her face on a rainy day, it was the kiss under the stars as the lights faded away. It was the feeling of safety despite the unknown, it was that feeling I shared with that someone who was the person I wanted to grow old with. In view of the events that came to pass, however, revisiting those intimate moments of the past caused me to question where it all fitted into the moment, how everything was merely theatrics that eventually led to a soap drama with a bad ending. I was left alone during the closing credits, asking myself the same question my friend asked herself in that blog entry, despite being in a completely different situation from myself. She is in a very healthy relationship I'd say, I have met the guy before. He is a good person, the kind of person who'd take a bullet. This is how a happy couple would look and feel like, but at the same time I suppose even perfection has its imperfections, and you start to fear when it is all going to end. 

It may seem strange for a person in a relationship to question the nature of love, but I guess it is only natural from my point of view. That is especially true for her, after being through so many relationships in the past, quitting a partner because things did not work out, one way or another. It resulted in her questioning herself in the end, as to why she is in her current relationship at all. You see, when you are together with somebody for a long enough time, you start to wonder if you are with this person for the sake of being with someone, if you are with a person because there isn't a better person out there for you, or because this person has less qualities that piss you off to no end. Either way you see it, it is not your idealistic reasons to be with somebody, but that is perhaps the other perspective of looking at things. It's all about cost benefits here, the exchange theory that makes love so economical in nature. By the books, we stay with someone because this person gives us less trouble than the others. It is a cold and harsh way of looking at things, but it is a perception that we cannot wholly deny. We are that selfish, we are that self-absorbed. What is love if it is not being with a person who can provide more to satisfies our emotional and physical needs - we don't know that anymore.

If we attempt to get to the bottom of this, I think we are going to find love to be a very tangible thing, at least that is how I see it. I think love is tangible in the sense that it can be held in your hands, it is something you can touch with your fingers and smell with your nose. It is something you can see with your own two eyes and taste with your tongue, but it is hidden somewhere in this vast universe and nobody has ever seen it before. Those who have claimed to know what love is are no different from people sitting in a bar and telling stories to each other over a few cups of cold beer. You know how it is with rumors, they usually start with somebody thinking that they know something, and then it becomes amplified and then gets spread from mouth to mouth from then on. I think hidden deep in one of those untamed jungles of our world, or deep in the oceanic trenches in the seas lies the answer to the question we all seek, like something right out of the pages of a fantasy novel. 

Perhaps someday, a group of adventurers would seek to find it, to find the tangible love that I spoke of, like the template of any great adventure stories. This is how it is going to happen one day, and it'd begin with a rich old man in his death bed, thinking back upon his life and then finding out that he has never experienced true love before. He has had a lot of women in his life, women that came and went and none of them remained long enough to warm his bed. So he recruits a group of people to seek out the legendary thing called "love", deep in the jungles or the Pacific Ocean. The old man has nothing to lose, he doesn't have any children to inherit his money or a mistress he loves enough to will his wealth to. So he invests in all the equipments needed for this group of adventurers to embark on the journey out into the unknown, to seek out the answer to the question of love that has troubled us for the longest time. 

The quest is difficult, and the team has found nothing through the forests and the oceans, not even in the mountains or in the deep undiscovered caves. The old man panics, his days are drawing to an end and he knows it. He decides to go public with the quest, broadcasting to the world regarding his ambitions, and promises the remainder of his wealth for those who knows about the whereabout of this thing called "love". Given enough time, given enough money, anybody talks, anybody spills. People started to send in maps and stories from all over the world, and each clue was carefully inspected and discarded by a workforce specially gathered by this rich old man. By the end of the month, the team finally secures a plausible clue in Antarctica, and a ship was sent for with the original adventurers to the southern-most point of the world. Once there, the team began on their trek across the icy lands to the location of "love".

This is where the story ends, this is the climax. They are going to find love, frozen deep beneath the ice inside a locked chest. They are going to burn off the ancient lock and then they are going to open the chest. Within that chest, they are going to find "love", they are going to hold it in their hands and they are going to be famous. At least that is what they hoped for moments before they opened the chest. The truth is, however, as tangible as it is, "love" really is an over-rated, well, thing. It is going to disappoint a lot of people, it is going to be the biggest letdown in human history. People are going to look at its photographs and despair, for love no longer is a mystery, it is no longer something which everybody is trying to find out. It is going to look ordinary, too ordinary, normal to human eyes. People are going to give up on love, because it no longer fascinates them the way it did when it remained buried under the ice, people are going to lose their faith in it altogether.

That is how it is going to go down, that is the truth about love. I believe, that if one day we were to find the answer to our question regarding love, it is going to let us down. I think we are not supposed to know what it is really, it should be something we are constantly trying to find out. It doesn't matter if you are with someone because that person satisfies you in the right way, if that person merely irritates you the least. These questions about love are going to consume us sooner or later if we dwell on it for too long, it is going to eat us from the inside out and the answer is not going to be pretty. I don't think we know what love is, and I don't think we want to know what it is either. If something like love has the ability to be so wonderful and dreadful at the same time, if something like love has the ability to save a million people and to slaughter a million more, I think the world is not ready to know what it is yet. Let it be an unknown, a question mark. Let it be buried, be a constant wonder in our minds. Because at the end of the day, it is not about what love is, but about who you love that is even more important.