So I saw her again.

And She's Joey's Girlfriend, or closer though I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't use that language to define their relationship.

For some brief and terible moments I had to hold back the strongest sense of jealousy. It put me to shame that I was burning up inside over a girl who is obviously the best thing going for him right now. Once it passed though I started to see things in a different light and have carried that light with me the rest of the day.

At first I was really depressed thinking "when God? When am I going to have that kind of love in my life?" I tried to take it out of my system by playing music but it didn't really go away and I started to think.

First I was amazed that I didn't see it the day before. I recalled something someone had said in a documentary called Thirst The quote paraphrased was something like "It's surprising how blinded a person can be to an issue if his pay check depends on him not seeing it". I thought about that and how if you substitute self interest for paycheck it could be applied universally.

It's remarkable how easily I can be blinded to something when I believe my self interest depends on me not seeing it.

Then I thought back to how obviously she cared for him, how even though he might have tuberculosis and everyone who visits him is supposed to go in there looking like clean room technicians in a computer plant and she's there nursing him and caring for him without even so much as a mask. When a nurse came in and told her to wear one she replied that she'd been with him since the start, she eventually did put on a mask but I think it was mostly so that the nurse wouldn't get in trouble or so she wouldn't be kicked out or something.

much later I started thinking about love as a concept. I asked myself if I had ever been in love and I thought back over my prolific high school sex life, I thought about all the girls I'd been with and of all of them I could only list three with whom I could say with certainty that I had been in love. I then asked myself why I had been in love whith each of them I examined each relationship and after an hour or so I concluded that the thing that each of these three relationships had in common was what each did for me, how each made me feel, what I got out of them.

I had begun to speculate before doing this that perhaps the idea of romantic love was just a big smoke and mirrors job. I could think of lots of people whom I love, family members, dear friends, historical figures like Thomas Merton or Dorothy Day. Icould also concieve of an un compromising, unyielding and everlasting love, So I could believe in Phillial and Agape love easily but Eros... that elusive romantic love seemed to me to be a big con, it still does.

These three women whom I could look back on and think with certainty that I had been in love with, the love I was in was all selfish love. I guaged this attachment by what each person had done for me and how they had made me feel. I attached myself to them like a leech, I fed off these sensations and lusted after them and in the end, very short ends, I was left alone again and torn up, fucked up, devastated and low. like going through an emotional sort of withdrawal.

So this couldn't be love, in none of those relationships could I say that I loved any of them.

If being in love is a selfish sort of thing, a kind of emotional addiction based on how another person makes you feel about yourself then loving someone would have to be a selfless thing.

To really love someone maybe you have to be willing without thought to disregasrd yourself or your comfort for someone else. Maybe like Caralyn and Joey, you have to risk tuberculosis because you can't do otherwise, you maybe can't even concieve of doing otherwise.

Christ Loved, he Loved us enough to give us everything with out fail and without grudge. I want to say without pause, and but for his Agony in the Garden it would be completely true. Saint Francis loved when he kissed the leper, Damien of Molokaii loved when he went to minister to the lepers there, Caralyn loves as she sits next to Joey tonight and watches him sleep breathing the same air without barrier.

I have never loved like that, I have never had to, I want to, and I never want to stop.