I have indeed given up on "finding love" being seamless, easy, and clear. Love really is a journey as Ruell sings, and sometimes like Malec in Shadowhunters, you have to go to hell and back twice for the ones you love, and even then, there is no guarantee--only hope, and trust in the ones we love and live for and sometimes who we are lucky enough to live with.

So, despite things not working out sometimes, despite the unplanned for rude grenades and emotional suicide bombers we may meet on a date, I pack my Mithril armor, like Frodo, under my shirt, and ward off the Ring Wraiths dressed up as ordinary humanoids. I also spend more time now just living life, riding motorbikes down roads at night to the swaying of lit Luner New Year lanterns, feeling the cool air and enjoying the moon above me, going to the beach in the morning to see what it is like when the day is waking on the ocean, and being grateful for the present solitude, whether it remains forever, or is changed in a instant.

If I ever do meet "the one," how will I know it is him? Well, if a man is riding a camel backwards across the beach one morning I may just go up and ask him why it took him so long to cross the Sahara, but in all seriousness, I think it will be in the surety, in the kindness and care, in the quiet considerations, and in the fact that they like almost everything about me and I feel the same way about them--that they are my version of Puen, and I am their non-nagging equivalent of Talay from the Thai series Vice Versa, and that it is not about if we can imagine the world without one another, but that we can ONLY imagine it with each other--in every universe. Is that cheesy and pie-in-the-sky? Perhaps, but I will wait for good dairy products and pastries until the cows (or camels as the case may be) come home.

So at the end of the day, I think the thing that matters is to trust our journeys and to realize that home and the road to it may be different than we expect. It may not be a picket fence yard in suburbia or an apartment in Manhattan. Home may end up being a treehouse in the jungle or a mountain villa in the Himalayas. Our home may be us and our partner with our kids, us alone in our comfy hobbit hole like Bilbo, it could end up being us and our delightful roomies, or us and the kids the universe gave us in ways we never planned. But no matter how the road is or what home looks like, it is our road and our home, and that is what our heart beats through and to.

https://preview.redd.it/w1lg01fzddic1.png?width=512&format=png&auto=webp&s=14aeda06442d84489eb8ebdd4546965e176764cb

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