I think we want to be loved. I think love means different things to us, even though we go around acting and believing like we all share the one same meaning of the word. I think some of us have a very hard time knowing what it means, either in the societal sense, or to ourselves particularly.

It is definitely time to crack a bottle of wine. Our selection tonight is a Syrah from Esperanza along the Mimbres River.

I didn’t used to care much what it meant, beyond getting laid. I had this idea that we all should take care of ourselves, and then sometimes those self-cared-for selves would come together and be greater than the sum of their parts, and that would be nice for a change. That theory was enough, and good.

Now I think differently. I probably still don’t care as much as other people, about Love. But I do care more than I used to, and I have some few evolving ideas about the meaning.

I felt the love in Wellington all those winter years ago, when the girl went out and started my car and got the heater cranking. I felt it not because the cold night air was awful at all. I felt it because someone was caring about the same things I cared about. Caring with me, in the same ways I cared.

Sometimes people say that love is being able to count on someone. I think that’s half right. I think that when people care with you, in the same ways, for the same reasons, they’ll be dependable, for independent reasons of their own.

This is why almost nothing in the world feels as good as knowing someone is reading this. Subscribing to that. I know they’re not doing it dutifully. I know they have their reasons to care, besides just being dutiful toward me.

At the end of The Garden of Eden, this is what Hemingway is trying to get at.

He felt Marita’s shoulder by him and heard her say, “I know David. It hit me too.”

“Don’t let it.”

“I’m glad it did. There’s nothing to do but we’ll do it.”

“Good.”

“We’ll really do it. Toi et moi.”

Marita isn’t the one he’s married to, but she is the truelove, and this is how he knows.

So thanks for loving me, if you are one of the very rare ones who has figured out how.