Love Is.

In Love Isn’t, I discussed my qualms about answering the question “What is love?” Rach isn’t letting me skip the project in its entirety (dammit), BUT she is giving me a slight pass and tweaking the question instead. What a pal.

“Thank God,” I said. “Because if you were to ask me what love is, I’d say it was us yesterday at Nikko’s house.”

The day before, three girls got in their Sunday’s best (basketball shorts, tanks, sweats, and tees) and dragged themselves over to our girl Nikko’s house. Some of us still drunk from the night before. OK fine, that was just me. At any rate, we all collapsed onto the bed makeup-less, and hair in messy buns. Through the wonders of technology we gathered around the Macbook and witnessed our friend get married all the way in New York, and through the wonders of Chinese delivery we grubbed on walnut prawns, garlic noodles, fried rice, mixed vegetables, and sweet and sour pork chops. The rest of the afternoon consisted of ice-cream, napping, chocolate, making it thunder-clap, Mary-Jane, chips and dip, me pretending to watch football, and even more chocolate.

We had just seen each other two nights before, yet there we were again. Doing absolutely nothing – and having a grand old time doing it. We didn’t wait until the next day to text each other because we didn’t want to do too much, and we didn’t hesitate to make plans so soon for fear of smothering anyone. The laughs were bottomless, the conversation was natural, and no one hesitated to be too silly, or too weird, or too anything but be themselves. Now tell me that isn’t love.

Not the most conventional answer, but it’s my answer right now. And lately, it’s all the love I’ve been getting. The love shared between friends will never be the same as that among lovers, but it doesn’t make it any less important or real. In probably my most favorite-tist Raaachem post ever she said, “Even though I can’t give you the love you want right now, I can give you the love I have, I hope for now, that’s enough.”

Well it’s not. It’s even more. And if it’s this good now, I can’t even imagine how great it will soon be.