The Piano Knows Something I Don't Know

What is love?

What is love?

The next day, after my meeting with my Ancient Philosophy professor, I returned to Flack Hall to get ready for my date with Brendon. To be honest, I had no idea how exactly I was supposed to prepare for a date. I wasn't even close to popular in high school, and I definitely didn't have anyone interested in dating me. Dating was a new experience for me, but I was glad that I was experiencing it with Brendon.

It wasn't even close to four o'clock, so I pulled out my philosophy textbook and a copy of the complete works of Plato and started working on some homework. Our first unit in Ancient Philosophy was about Plato, although I thought that he was just a little bit overrated. His works were only proof that gay fanfiction is much older than we think that it is. His primary subject, Socrates, was my real hero, but his distaste for writing things down meant that the only way that I could learn more about him was through Plato.

My assignment was to read and take notes on The Republic, Apology of Socrates, and Symposium by Tuesday, so we could discuss them in class in the following weeks. I had already read The Republic, so I decided to read Symposium next. I was just cracking the book open when Patrick entered the dorm room.

Patrick didn't look like himself. His face was unnaturally pale, and he looked like he had come down with some sort of nasty illness. "Are you okay?" I asked him as he wearily sat down and opened up a chemistry textbook.

Patrick muttered something about not being okay and promising something that I couldn't understand. I figured that he wasn't in the mood to talk, so I went back to my reading. However, I couldn't focus. Thoughts of Brendon and my upcoming date with him kept flooding my mind, preventing me from paying much attention to the characters' discussions in the dialogue. As I contemplated my relationship with Brendon and worried about all of the things that could go wrong during our date, one question kept coming back to me.

Did I love Brendon?

I definitely cared about Brendon, and I liked him a lot. He was my perpetual companion, and often the only person that I wanted around. When we were together, magic happened. However, I wasn't sure if I loved him or not, if only because I wasn't sure what love felt like. I had never felt what I felt with Brendon when I was around anyone else, but I wasn't sure if that was love. If it wasn't love, then what was it? There was nothing else to compare Brendon to.

What was love anyways? I had heard so much about love and romance, but until now, I had never experienced it for myself. I knew that I couldn't trust other peoples' experiences, but I was starting to wonder if I could trust myself. I didn't know anything about love, and I definitely couldn't tell for myself if I loved Brendon or not.

I decided to continue on with my reading, despite the fact that I hadn't solved the issue of how I felt about Brendon. As it turned out, Symposium was a dialogue about the very subject that I had been agonizing over: the nature of love. It was a bit complicated, but that was the way I liked my philosophy assignments. Brendon continued to invade my mind, but I tried my best to push him out and focus on my homework.

About halfway through the dialogue, I found an interesting passage. One of the characters in the dialogue, Aristophanes, proposed that love is a result of the gods splitting humans in two, and humans then searching for their missing half. I read through his speech, and something seemed familiar about all of it.

And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and would not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover's intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment. Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side, by side and to say to them, "What do you people want of one another?" they would be unable to explain.