18: twisting the knife

When in Florida I sifted through my mounds upon mounds of journals, paper, drawings, photos... etc. among other treasures, i found this book I once recorded my favorite quotes in - even the margins are covered with scribble. But I turned to it tonight after a distressing phone conversation and found this from my freshman year of college...

letter from Rainer Maria Rilke

To love is good, too: love being difficult.
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.
With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love.
But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is--solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves.
Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate--?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.

i want to ripen, to grow: now i realize that love is not merging, giving over, becoming one. love is loving an individual and being an individual and choosing to be with that individual day after day.

maybe?