03.02.2004 - 12:01 p.m.

I went up to Hyattsville on Saturday to hang out, to have some girl time with a friend of mine. She is still dating the rebound from her last rebound (who she was engaged to) in this serious/shallow, short-term/live-in kind of way. She is not happy.

They went to Alabama over winter break and met his family. She says it was perfect. She says she is tired of living in �urbia� and that what she wants is a tight-knit southern town like that one, where everyone is family. She speaks of mothers and shops and homemade pie, but not a word of him. She says dating is going well since their last breakup, but I can hear them arguing through the bedroom door and I want to go in there, drag him out, and punt him down the street. Then I want to shake her, until her brain rattles itself into some kind of order, preferably an order that could realize that she�s strong enough to get her own damn southern town.

She�s thinking about grad school, but she doesn�t know for what yet. Everyone tells her to take some undergrad courses first, to help her pick a subject, but she doesn�t want to give up her nights. It doesn�t matter what she studies. It is just the principle of the thing that she needs. The change. Moving or studying or quitting her job, she believes any of those changes could make her happy, if only she could find the motivation.

I can think of a better change to make. I tell her she should try southern Maryland, that I�ll need a roommate starting in the summer, that there are lots of jobs and courses and ideas down here. I tell her she is visiting me in a few weeks, sans the ball and chain.

I don�t know if she will. She believes she loves him, and maybe she does. It is not a word with a specific definition that I could hold her to. Love is patient, love is kind, love is all you need? Love is what you�ll do to yourself for the sake of another? Or is it not being able to leave because you can�t believe you deserve better, because you don�t understand that better is out there, waiting for you? I could tell her that love takes every good part of you and multiplies it, that it holds you still in the storm, that it is beautiful because it could end at any time, but she would only hear echoes of every sappy song that's ever been sung, and she would think I was exaggerating.

Love. I still resent that word, this language for sounding the same every time, as if it ever described the same thing, as if the sky, the sea, and a sapphire were all the same �blue.�

-stonebridge

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