I'm trying to remember what it was to be just young, just beginning to understand the ways of the heart and the body, more to the point. the first stirrings of desire that one feels as an early teen, if not sooner, and you find yourself reaching for classmates and finding yourself in cut-class sticky fumblings and sweet summer fields and those landscapes that lay beyond the closed doors of your parent's house, because it's all you've got and you'll take it because what you feel is hunger.

I tend to be a cynic here, and firmly believe that what we feel at such a young age is rarely the real thing, if the "real" thing exists at all, even as we age. This, of course, begs the question right away, what is the "real" thing and how does anyone define love for someone else. You can't. it's that simple. Love is what we feel. It is that thing that connects us to some other on a level that hits deeper than a desire for some other. It's about want and need and lust and yearning and a soft of weird mutual and much maligned codependence. At it's core, there is nothing wrong with co-dependence. It can be a beautifully working thing, a mechanism that keeps two people spinning in the same orbit.

Too often I hear that we all need to be these islands of people, so okay and together on our own and with no need of others. That we can exist all by ourselves and with no support system whatsoever, yet I don't really know anybody like this in reality. To a greater or lesser extent, we all can achieve this sort of mad independence and be righteous and proud of it. And why not. Being independent is good and needing other people, or even wanting other people, is often dangerous territory. Feelings can go unreturned, love is not always mutual, rejections abound, even dislikes or worse, the complete noncommittal stance of one who could care one way or the other about you and hardly knows of your existence. These are the dangers of what we call love, or more appropriately perhaps, desire. The heart wants what it wants and seeks it out.

I watch as those younger go about arm in arm, awkward in their newfound adulthood, finding their way along the corridor of being sexually comfortable with each other as they reach to each other with complete inexperience and ignorance. The land of what is not known. We've all been there, and somehow, most of us find our way through it and to the other side. I even know people who are now married to that first girl they met in junior high school and had their first experience of love, of sex, and remained in that place forever, and happily so. It's always somewhat bewildered me. How is it possible, I thought, to just know in that way that you need to know, to never want to experience another person, to just be so solid in that love that this is the One, the Only, the person who will always be there.