Venn Diagram

When do we stop "liking" and start "loving"? And can you retreat back from love into like? Must one precede the other? I visualize this as one of those Venn diagrams where the circles overlap, and the overlapping gray area is the ideal state of any relationship. Like seems to be a simpler, more blasé, less demanding form of affection, and love is the result of a cultivated, time-honored "like," something proprietary that comes with hooks and nets and appendages. Like makes us smile on the outside, love makes us smile on the inside. But it must be that each is an impulse triggered by a completely separate emotional need, and when we like and love recklessly is when our feelings don't fall into the overlapping area. And then there must be a third circle for rigid contempt. It's entirely possible to love, like, and hate someone all at once--that overlapping gray area actually seems the most true and sophisticated. Hell, maybe there's a fourth one that I haven't figured out yet, and then this would be a very complicated approval matrix of like, love, hate, and something else. The fourth might simply be the absence of the other three: the verb form of numb.

Last night was the first snow of the Brooklyn winter, and I made cookies. This morning it's raining brown toilet water in my kitchen. For the second time since I signed the lease in August.