A Dance For Rain

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This room of fools

We make something together

We're open wounds

The beautiful untethered

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Limerence: certain uncertainty

A friend of mine shares the same curse as me: limerence.

As he was detailing all the ways his most recent infatuation has derailed his life, like the endless scheming to be closer, the obsession with reshaping himself, and, most alarmingly, the ease with which he now turns a blind eye toward an obvious truth, I found myself finishing his sentences.

It’s not like he doesn’t know how foolish he’s being. He’s fully aware that his object of infatuation can’t ever be the person he needs him to be. This person has even explicitly told him so! But the relationship, even in its current form - and it’s a form that’s killing him from the inside out - remains too sweet for him to let go of…

And it’s not that he hasn’t tried distancing from the relationship. But each time he was met with pleas for him to rethink the decision. Stay, please stay, we can work through this and be friends! And how do you say no to someone you care so much about? It feels like an impossible choice, like amputating a limb to save yourself from gangrene.

I asked if he really thinks he can truly be friends with this person, and his answer was… maybe? But I think he knows, and I think the ambiguity of his answer is just an excuse to delay the inevitable. Lord knows I’ve done the same. Time and time again I’ve lied, not just to others but to myself, because I wasn’t ready to confront the truth. I lied because I was an addict, terrified of letting go of a high I had grown to love and depend on.

I often wonder if and when I’ll ever be ready to reconnect with him again... and what I’m really asking when I wonder this is if I think I can finally pass this test: can I think of him and not have it trigger my sympathetic nervous system? Do I still feel a knot in my chest so tight it wrings the oxygen out of my lungs? If yes, then no. I’m not ready.

And I’m not. Not a single day has gone by in a year and a half of silence that I haven’t thought of him and the relationship we had, and not a single day has gone by that I haven’t felt a mix of visceral emotions. From fervent joy when recounting the good times to crippling sadness and frustration when realizing what I’ve lost… my response runs the gamut of emotions.

Every emotion but apathy.

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H = R – E

A friend defined Happiness as the difference between Reality and Expectation, which I thought was such a simple but elegant formula. The greater the expectation, the more elusive the happiness.

There’s a line from Past Lives that I haven’t been able to shake: “Getting married is hard for idealistic people like you.”

I think idealists and dreamers carry these rich interior worlds saturated with the most vibrant of colors, and in these worlds they’re searching for a beauty that is, to them, cosmic and divine. What’s tragic is that beauty like that can’t ever be captured, not fully.

I think this is why so many of the most influential artists are also the most tortured. Why they walk hand-in-hand with melancholy. This interior world, while pulsing with color and emotion, leaves behind a reality in greyscale. A reality always yearning for more.

Ever now and then I’ll believe, or allow myself to believe, I’ve defied the odds and have encountered a moment where reality meets expectation. These moments are few and far between, and they always feel like a flash of lightning. A dazzling spark, disappearing as quickly as it came.

I really should know, though, especially now more than ever, to be skeptical! These moments, as beautiful as I want them to be, are warped - tinged in projection, in longing, in meaning that’s entirely subjective.

But this is my greatest vice, I guess, and sometimes, despite knowing better, I can’t help but indulge. Just a taste. A touch. Close my eyes and let myself embrace… for a moment.

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This past weekend at Gay Ski Week, my group closed out a weekend of successful skiing with one final hurrah – Elevation’s grand Neon Dance Party. There was one boy in our group I’d always found exceptionally cute, so much so that a part of me found my attraction to him as a bit of a threat – an attraction that I knew, if I weren’t careful, could become a destabilizing force, which was the last thing I needed. Throughout the trip, we had what could be interpreted as light flirting – flirting that left room for ambiguity, for doubt, for off-ramps for either of us to save face.

On that last night, when the rest of our group decided to go home early, he and I decided to stay. And when the last of our friends trickled out of the venue, when it was finally just us alone, we both - in unison - looked at each other… and laughed. I wonder if he thought the same thing as me: At last… We’re alone now.

We then danced, intimately. Danced without fear of judgement. And in this moment, I was happy. Happy because reality had exceeded my expectation. Expectation that someone as cute as him, with so much social currency, could not and would not be into me.

We then went home together, and to our surprise, our place was empty. Our friends had made the wise decision to grab food, leaving us, once again, alone. We, in silence - as if sound would break the spell and shatter the fantasy, as if words would reveal our transgressions - made our way to the living room couch. First politely seated, then his head on my shoulder, finally us lying side by side. Inching our bodies closer and tighter together, attempting to maximize our shared surface area. We cuddled as long as we could, heavy breaths and delicate touches, until we heard the door unlock, at which point we both bolted up and rearranged ourselves in a way that could be seen as respectable.

But in those moments when our bodies had quietly intertwined, coiled gently, it was nice. A brief, beautiful moment of reality exceeding expectation. A taste of the cosmic. A touch of the divine.

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We've been talking, now I'm singing

What if I die with this song inside?

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Take me into all of the little worlds that I don’t know

I want to understand the way you feel, the way you love

Every now and then – well, more then than now, but it DID happen for the first time in a long while today – I’ll come across someone who, for whatever reason, evokes sort of this… divine madness in me. There’s not just an emotional response but a physiological one too: shallow breaths, dilated pupils, weak knees. I always find it sort of incredible and miraculous how someone’s presence and presence alone can have such an impact on me. What comes next, always, is the question murmured underneath my breath: how can something be so beautiful?

The feeling is probably best described as awe, much like the awe we feel when taking in an incredible landscape or the beauty of a song that brings us to tears. Greeks called it Eros, psychologists Dopamine, and poets “a beauty that undoes someone”.

Whatever it’s called, I, for whatever reason, can’t seem to cut this part of me loose. Or maybe I have but it just keeps growing back, not unlike a tumor. Regardless, this feeling once again has bloomed inside of me, albeit briefly… and less like a flower and more like a bramble thicket. A feeling that’s not lust exactly, or maybe not only lust, but a dizzying desire to be more. To take myself apart and build myself anew. A feeling of wanting to give myself away.

But hasn’t therapy taught me anything? I know the root of these feelings, don’t I? It’s less about the beauty in them and more about what I, consciously or not, feel is lacking in myself… It’s the impulse to become worthy of a beauty I believe I’m unworthy of. This feeling, while delicious and intoxicating, should not be an invitation to pine more or to wallow in self-pity. No, it’s a sign that I, once again, need to get my shit together. That, maybe, I’ve once again lost sight of what’s important, which is… doing the hard work of bettering myself for myself rather than looking for it in someone else.

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But I like-like you.

I don’t think anyone was more surprised than I was to find myself developing feelings for someone new. I didn’t think it was possible. Not yet. Not while my last spell of limerence still held such a vise-like grip on my heart.

He was a friend. A friend who knew my situation, who understood the messiness of it all and the extent of my madness, but stood by me anyway. Our relationship was always supportive, oftentimes flirty, and, most importantly, silly. And this confirmed something I already knew, which is: there is nothing I value more in someone than the willingness to be stupid and silly.

There is something so intimate, almost erotic, about finding someone whose mind seems to be dancing in parallel with yours - the two of us inferring what the other is thinking, racing the other to the punchline. Each laugh a point, tallied for some grand moment when the victor can finally say, See? I won. I beat you… I know you more.

I confessed how I felt – how I was developing romantic feelings, and how this situation was a strange, unfamiliar place for me. That I was developing feelings for someone new while still actively working towards letting go of the tremendous love I had for someone else this fantasy I had so painstakingly nurtured.

He… didn’t feel the same way. As he gently turned me down, my mind began sifting through the past year, gathering evidence the way it always does- replaying all the memories and moments I had taken as irrefutable proof that, this time, I couldn’t possibly be wrong. That the feelings should have been mutual… shouldn’t they?

I remember feeling a flash of anger, the reflexive but predictable how dare you - how can you tell me the feelings aren’t mutual when there was this, and that, and all these other moments that, to me, could never have been interpreted as merely platonic?

But then I thought about my last spell of limerence, and was reminded of how I’m so incredibly talented at seeing what I want to see…. That my senses, the very tools I use to discern truth, often fail me. And that I mustn’t forget that… people can be flirty and intimate and affectionate without it meaning anything more regardless of how special I think our connection is… and that my mind has this terrible habit of embellishing, of overlaying these moments with the rosiest of tints.

The truth is simple: They like me – it’s true - but they don’t like me the way I like them. And that’s… okay - they are well within their right to do so. While painful, the responsibility, ultimately, comes down to me to meet these situations with sober eyes. To recognize and cherish these interactions for what they really are, without hoping for more. Without turning them into some silly, intricate love story built on longing rather than truth.

Rejection hurts, but there is a silver lining in all of this, I think. This was proof that the impossible is possible - that I do have the capacity within me somewhere to develop feelings for someone new. I should be grateful, I guess. And I am, I think, or at least will be, once I finish licking the wounds.

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From the beginning I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly. But am I working toward an extreme of joy, or of pain? Will I achieve a minimum, or a maximum? These questions are in my mind when your father asks me, “Do you want to make a baby?” And I smile and answer, “Yes,” and I unwrap his arms from around me, and we hold hands as we walk inside to make love, to make you.

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I’ll feel elated at this evidence of a unique mother-child bond, this certitude that you’re the one I carried. Even if I had never laid eyes on you before, I’d be able to pick you out from a sea of babies: Not that one. No, not her either. Wait, that one over there. Yes, that’s her. She’s mine.

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I’ll run a finger over your belly, marveling at the uncanny softness of your skin, wondering if silk would abrade your body like burlap.

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But occasionally I have glimpses when Heptapod B truly reigns, and I experience past and future all at once; my consciousness becomes a half-century-long ember burning outside time. I perceive—during those glimpses—that entire epoch as a simultaneity. It’s a period encompassing the rest of my life, and the entirety of yours.