And love is..

I bought a book on Friday.
Jodi Picoult's The Pact.


Synopsis

In this contemporary tale of love and friendship, Jodi Picoult brings to life a familiar world, and in a single terrifying moment awakens every parent's worse fear: We think we know our children… but do we ever really know them at all?

For eighteen years the Hartes and the Golds have lived next door to each other, sharing everything from Chinese food to chicken pox to carpool duty-- they've grown so close it seems they have always been a part of each other's lives. Parents and children alike have been best friends, so it's no surprise that in high school Chris and Emily's friendship blossoms into something more. They've been soul mates since they were born.
So when midnight calls from the hospital come in, no one is ready for the appalling truth: Emily is dead at seventeen from a gunshot wound to the head. There's a single unspent bullet in the gun that Chris took from his father's cabinet-- a bullet that Chris tells police he intended for himself. But a local detective has doubts about the suicide pact that Chris has described.

The profound questions faced by the characters in this heart-rending novel are those we can all relate to: How well do we ever really know our children, our friends? What if…? As its chapters unfold, alternating between an idyllic past and an unthinkable present, The Pact paints an indelible portrait of families in anguish… culminating in an astonishingly suspenseful courtroom drama as Chris finds himself on trial for murder.

--
A book, to me is not just simply a book.
When I said I bought a book on Friday, the truth was, I bought more than I asked for. I bought life's succint lesson on love and relationships compressed in a book.

I read and I understand..
I read and I learn
I read and I envy

I find my answers in books.
"how do you know you love someone?"
I never had a correct answer to the above before. But each time I read one of her books I somehow draw conclusions on what I think is love. It accumulates to a great big theory that leaves me even more depressed than I've ever been.

When you love someone, you let them take care of you.
I took this word for word from the book.
What startled me when I read it, was how true that reflected what I felt but I've never acknowledged it consciously. Because that is how my significant other would know I love them. It is when I trust my life in their hands.

When I say my life, I meant probably just about every aspect of it.
It's simple. Not that I am not capable of taking care of myself or my own life.
It's because at the same time as I've entrusted mine to you, I've devoted my life to taking care of yours.

And I am not saying this just because.
I am saying it because this, I realise, is how I've been loving.

How much you love, depends on the extent you would go to, to take care of that someone.
In the story, the guy loved that girl so much he took care of her and took the pain away from her something she had always wanted just so she could to stop hurting. He took her life. He did it, because she couldn't do so herself even though that was what she badly wanted. As much as he wanted her to live and because he loved her, he took care of her, placed her needs above his own and did what he could for her.
That is love and that makes me envious.

I was once loved that same way. And I guess that's all that matters.

However, how then is it possible for anyone to move on from that kind of love thereafter?

Do you hold onto that same definition of love and seek out scenarios and situations to fit the definition in? Or do you shape your definition to the love that you are experiencing?

Love is defined the same way for me.
I still believe when you love someone, you let them take care of you.

I am still facing my same old problems the same old way.
Alone by myself.

It's time I learn take care of myself.