dear hilary: a revolving door

Dear Hilary,Every one around me seems to be falling in love. The older I get the more I realize I'm not sure what being in love means. Each person I ask how they know it's the love and not some other shade of love they never answer the same. And yet somehow it's the same. The person always finishes with, "You'll just know." But I don't know. How did you know it was love?Sincerely,Is It Love?Dear Is it Love?,I think I asked myself that question every night before I fell asleep in the days leading up to meeting Preston for the first time. Is it love? I asked a group of ducks that wandered across the road on my way to Starbucks one morning. Is it love? I asked my bleary-eyed reflection in the mirror. Is it love, is it love - and behind the question was this fear about myself. I had asked people, just like you have, about love. I had heard the many answers: that you know because they will order the Chinese food on the night you need it without being told, that you know because they'll offer to do the laundry and the dishes in the same day, because they catch you around your waist on the street, with people watching, and kiss you. Because they'll tell you things that you've longed to believe about yourself but you couldn't before, give you a pair of hands to help you hold all that you are and desperately hope to become.I had heard it.And then I met Preston in that airport.I'd tell you that I just knew, too, but the truth is that I think knowing about love is more like a revolving door. You walk around and around inside love, see the outside world in one instance, the inside world (the world of you and the person you love) in another. You ponder them both in the same moment. You spiral in and out of knowing, in and out of certainty.What keeps you afloat is trust.What keeps us all afloat is a trust that even if we don't know, if we have moments when we wake up and it is a question, when everyone tells us "you'll just know" and we think that there is no way that can be true - because I hardly know myself some days - that's when you trust that you can still walk forward, still walk around and around inside the love, and somehow see your next step.I could tell you the stories of falling in love with Preston, small moments when I felt it moving in my heart: the time we ate Chinese food on the floor watching Company (the Sondheim musical), or the time we made my family dinner in the kitchen and I was singing Alison Krauss songs and he was searing lamb chops in something I couldn't even probably pronounce, or the time that we sat side-by-side in the midst of something really hard, and prayed our way through it...But the truth is, though I knew in those moments I was in love with him, part of the joy is realizing it new every time - a moment of being surprised by the in-love-ness. It takes me asking, "is it love?" to answer yes. On days when all I want is to sit across from him in a Starbucks somewhere and write on our blogs and be in our own worlds, together and yet distinct, when all I wonder is whether this gift is really what I have now dared to dream it is...I guess a part of me likes asking, "is it love?" not because I want to doubt, but because there is something to saying yes. To choosing the answer to that question every day. To walking through the revolving door, the worlds never the same when I circle back around to them.I knew it a long time ago; and I learn it again every day.I want to wrap everyone up in the safe and beautiful words of, "you'll just know." But I also want to wrap around you the words that love is a many-splendored, ever-moving, choose-it-again-and-again kind of thing. Maybe the knowing must and should move with us, too.Is it love? We wonder in the world.There is a beauty to trusting the question as a way towards the answer.Love,hilary