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.

He was detailing me 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, how easily he now turns a blind eye toward an obvious truth. And as he went on, 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 just friends with this person, and his answer was… maybe? But I think he knows, and I think the ambiguity 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’m ready to 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 air out? 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 range of 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.

Every emotion but apathy.

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We've been talking, now I'm singing

What if I die with this song inside?

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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.

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The word “infant” is derived from the Latin word for “unable to speak,” but you’ll be perfectly capable of saying one thing: “I suffer,” and you’ll do it tirelessly and without hesitation. I have to admire your utter commitment to that statement; when you cry, you’ll become outrage incarnate, every fiber of your body employed in expressing that emotion. It’s funny: when you’re tranquil, you will seem to radiate light, and if someone were to paint a portrait of you like that, I’d insist that they include the halo. But when you’re unhappy, you will become a klaxon, built for radiating sound; a portrait of you then could simply be a fire alarm bell.

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The existence of free will meant that we couldn’t know the future. And we knew free will existed because we had direct experience of it. Volition was an intrinsic part of consciousness. Or was it? What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?