Will You Still Love Me Today?

A couple nights ago, I was talking to Nam about some boy she was talking to... Nam and I had a conversation about finding that special person and about how fate and circumstance has to work in your favor: the right time along with the right place along with the right person. It's a lot of alongs, and it doesn't really seem fair to anybody in the world who would ever want to leave one place and go to the other. The whole thing is so chancy, and it always seems so... pointless. I guess if you talked to a cynic, it probably is because how often can we ever expect to find someone at all the right "things." Nam and I have been taking turns battling back and forth with her theory; less about the logistics and more about the struggle of dealing with such intimidating circumstances.
After a three year hiatus, I dated someone my senior year--a freshman, the cardinal sin of a college senior. Multiple times, I was told that the relationship was pointless and in the aftermath, I probably would have agreed. At times, I still find myself holding that sentiment. However, I did it. I dated a freshman, and when it was great, it was great, and when I got into grad school... well... it wasn't. Now, with me being in DC and her heading ever so quickly into the Peace Corps, she's met this boy and it could be something, but with Nam being Nam, she makes it a logical puzzle. There's obviously no reason why she would ever go through with anymore than a brief make out before calling it quits. And as I texted her, nearly falling asleep because it was so late, I sent her this message,

We never really know what our futures look like, or if we have one, so I say enjoy it while you can. end it when you absolutely have to, and never regret that you took a moment out to care for someone. there may never be a good time for potential love or even companionship... so you have to take it when it arrives.

And, like most things that I internally contemplate, I asked myself as I was falling asleep that night A) Who the hell is the person that just said that to her? and B) Did you give someone a complete sense of false hope only to be let down? It's human nature I guess to err on the side of cynicism, but it really was too late to correct any possible mistake I made. Soon after our conversation I fell asleep and had one of the most startling dreams I've ever had in my life.
Patrice was the first person I saw in my dream; she ran up to a police officer standing at the edge of a taped off intersection. Smoke could be seen rising from the ground, and she asked him What's going on? He turned around and said There was a bomb in the metro; we're trying to get down there. Patrice pulled out her phone and began to text someone while saying to the officer My friends are on the metro. I'm guessing that the timeline went backwards from there, only on the basis that you just kind of understand what's going on in your dreams without any kind of explanation.
I could see everything that was going on--the day was as average as any other day in DC has been so far, and I remember looking up at the sky, blue and bright, the kind of sky that almost hurts to look at it because nothing is standing between you and the rest of the universe. Andrew, my roommate, had just called me to tell me that he had some issues going on at home with his girlfriend and that he was going down into the metro. I, however, was walking with someone I had never met before... hand in hand, as if I had done it for months and months leading up to the dream. Sure, I had never met the person walking with me in my dreams, but at one point, I turned around and leaned forward for a kiss. The kiss was nothing extraordinary, just a moment in the middle of a city that I barely know anything about. I said that we would meet up later to tell everyone about our news, and then I let the other hand go, leaned in for one more kiss and got on the escalator leading down to my own metro.
The last thing I remember before I woke up was watching the doors of the metro close behind me as I boarded at the last second, and then I woke up. Waking up from dreams like that usually send me into a panic, as if I have some ability to channel premonitions. But, the whole scenario didn't actually imply anything for certain, at least in the premonition world. I don't know if it was my train that had the bomb in it, nor did I know if it was Andrew's. But in the back of my mind, I had this gut feeling that it was mine. It was as if I knew that those doors were closing behind me for a reason, and that I didn't need to finish the dream to know what had happened. In dream world, as far as I was concerned, I had died that day on the metro... and in an odd way, I was okay with it.
The only reason that I wasn't in some kind of dream-induced panic attack is because, whether it was a dream or a premonition... or if I died or lived... that version of me that lived in that dream was happy. I could feel that happiness as I boarded the dream metro. I could feel that happiness as I leaned it for a kiss from the stranger that I obviously was about to bring further into my world. Somehow, in a world full of people that shoot up public places and a world full of war and disease, I had found some semblance of happiness lurking on the outside of a metro, and even if my world were to end directly after such a simple kiss, it would have been okay because for that moment I was happy.
And not by any means am I saying that I'm not happy now, but I think it's so easy at this point in our twenty-something lives to forget that there might be things to be happy about right now. And we spend all this time trying to fool proof our lives: we try our best to make relationships work that just aren't working anymore and in doing so, we ruin any chance of being able to look back upon it with a favorable perspective. We are hoping that by doing this or that we will solidify our futures to a point that we can ensure comfortability without knowing if we even have a future to be comfortable in. We hope for money and possessions, and we sometimes attempt to turn intangible things into something that we can see or feel because it's a better way to gauge our futures. If life were done on paper, it would be so much easier, but it's not.
After days of not posting and feeling completely blocked as to what I should write about, it came to me. I spent the day touring thrift stores and antique shops looking at furniture that I couldn't come close to buying. In my pursuits, I met an old woman who was giving away a record player. She gave me her address, and when I got there, she invited me into her house introducing me to her partner and her dog. She gave me the record player and told me that if someone didn't come pick up her records, I was free to come back by and get them. I thought about all the antiques and the record player and the life that woman and her partner had developed in their beautiful home. And though some of those things came from homes that were wealthy, surely, there were at least a couple things that came from someone who didn't have much. They live on through these people who purposefully go and buy their possessions in an attempt to own a part of someone's life that has already been lived out. The idea seems so comforting to me, that even after death, our lives could continue on through the things that we've left behind.
And I'm sure that all that I've been thinking about is a lot to process for one twenty-two year old boy in just a couple days, but while in search for the preliminary album to test out my new record player, I came across Carol King's Tapestry, which could be one of my favorite albums of all time. Going over the songs on the back to refresh myself, I came across "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" I found the whole concept to be a little farfetched... why ask someone to love you tomorrow when you have the opportunity to love them wholeheartedly today?