the thin lines

What's the difference between love and lust? 
 
He asks me this as we're sitting at my kitchen table, thinking about going to see Slint, but deciding we could save the money and take in the beauty of a warm spring night on my porch instead, talking about love and life and what we're reading and what we're thinking about.

sometimes it's good to know that guys feel just as lost about this stuff as we do... I say this, laughing that they sometimes google these existential questions too for lack of someone to talk to .  We are so strange.

 I don't have a good answer initially, in part because we were in such murky waters for that time and are no longer there and I don't want to say too much because of the motivations I've so often questioned and the ambiguities that were unanticipated. We are firmly back on the ground of friendship, which allows for more honesty and less awkwardness and I return to my usual more candid self.

And then I wake up this morning thinking about this question. That we all have lust if we're honest with ourselves, that our love is imperfect. But that maybe the main difference between the one and the other is that the one involves acting on a taking of pursuing one's own pleasure and happiness whether or not that leads to the happiness of the other, perhaps a mutual taking for that reason, and the other is borne out of a mutual giving that leads to receiving what we've desired. Sometimes one in the relationship is motivated by one or another, and our imperfect ways of relating mean there's a little bit of both. I tell him this, and he says he agrees, but I wonder if he understands what I mean.