2-24-99, 11:55 pm

Tonight after youth group singing we were walking back down the pier to our cars and Thom was silent. "Pondering?" I said, and he affirmed it. "Ponder ponder," I said. He paused.

"Do you ever think about the weirdness of it all?" he said.

"Oh yeah," I replied, "all the time. Someday we'll have to sit down and talk about it."

"Again." he smiled.

"Yeah. But... alas. Hey, I could drive you home! - I have enough gas in the car..." (he lives way out in the sticks)

So I drove him home. L started us on Truth or Dare when I dropped her off. We tittered a bit nervously and I told him that she and I don't play T or D much, because we know everything about each other, and we never take Dare because we're both evil and would end up running around outside in our skivvies or something. "Most of our questions are 'so... what'd you have for breakfast?' or the like."

After we asked each other what we'd eaten that day, he thought for a second. "What do you think love is?" He asked.

I told him that I thought love was "finding your soulmate, that person with whom everything just clicks, based on the Biblical definition of love." And I paused. "What's your definition of love?"

"Beyond what you said, about finding your soulmate and everything, I think it's when you find that person you just can't live without..." His voice trailed away, and picked up again. "And I don't think it's a stretch... for me falling in love with you."

I blushed. Driving. I was quite glad for the concealing darkness of the night, shattered only by the headlights of oncoming cars and the green glow of my spedometer. We gave each other reciprocal comments regarding it. He said it was very exciting getting to know me, and that we'd never had a bad time together, which is true. We stopped in a little driveway near his house to wait out the remaining minutes of his curfew (he was going on a 4-day jazz band trip the next morning) and blushed in the darkness and babbled and gushed to each other.

"I think you're beautiful," he said.

Of course I found this funny, but sweet. "You're a good-lookin' guy yourself," I remarked.

"It's so strange," he remarked. "I expected to find 'my person' later in life, in some foreign land, living her life away from here. I've been pondering the 'weirdness' of it all non-stop. You're plaguing my brain."

"Plaguing?"

"It's an expression," he laughed.

So I drove slowly down the road to his house. We pretty much solidified our strange "romance." I like the way it's going... tentative, unsure, slow, and a heck of a lot of fun. ^_^

Feel free to raise your hand at any moment.