Limerence: A Reflection on Yearning

An anecdote on when limerence was confused for love.

There was this girl that people used to tell me I was in love with. It was in the way that all the words I held back would get crowded in my throat until it was too tight to say anything at all. I was made so feeble by these pitiful interactions that I would groan and fold forward to press my face into the table to hide the burning heat in my cheeks while still smiling helplessly all the same. I’ve never been in love before, so I don’t know. What I do know is that if you were to bite into my feelings, they would taste bitter and be chewy and get stuck in your teeth, and that’s not what I want love to taste like, so I hope that I wasn’t.

I saw her on social media before we’d ever even met and had an instant dislike for her. The teasing tilt of her head and brazen smirk like she was daring me to look at the shape of her waist, imagine my hands there, and knew full well that I wanted to. I could never take a picture like that. Arrogant, presumptuous, shameless. If I were to look back at the long line of women I had disliked, even as a kid, I would see they had one thing in common: pretty as a picture and miles beyond my league.

We ended up meeting through a friend of a friend, and my god, you could have convinced me she was a witch with how fast I fell. It sounds pining and pathetic and all the other unlovely lovesick things even as I write it, but I had these big, black, chunky noise-cancelling headphones for studying because I struggled to concentrate, and her laugh was the only thing that cut through. I can hear it now, because I’ve still never heard one quite like it, the way it climbed like a ladder and stopped at each step.

I’d never met someone who had everything about them make so much sense, where the whole was so well made up of the parts. Where, with each new piece, my breath would leave me in a rush of oh, yes, love, of course, of course of course of course, because it was like re-meeting someone I’d always known. Like I had this stencil in my head of the world’s most perfect person, and she was colouring between the lines.

There was security in my belief that things were, and would remain, unrequited. It was my something to keep safe. We develop photographs in the dark because the light will bleach them, and we only peel back the skin of an orange to see its tenderness when we want to eat it.

Which is why being with her was the scariest thing I’ve ever done, and the most surreal. Because I never thought it would happen, and now I had something to lose. I would often feel like I was floating, not metaphorically but up, up away from my body, looking down at the pair of us like I was watching some couple get together in some fairytale film because there was just no way that could be me, could it? With her, like that, after all this time? But then I would feel her hand on my thigh, warm, steady, and I’d be the kite, she’d be the line, and I’d be on earth again.

Our first date was a month and a half before my birthday. I know this because she asked so that she wouldn’t forget. By the time it came around, she didn’t get me a gift.

She ended things over the phone, making sure to let me know that I was so nice, which was fine. I even went out of my way to say as such, because it totally wasn’t condescending or patronising or confirming of my worst fears in the slightest. And I suppose it shouldn’t have been a wonder that she didn’t feel anything for me when I was feeling so much for both of us. I just had to teach myself to sob silently as my bedroom suddenly felt so big that it was collapsing in on my chest, is all.

There was so much emotion and so much feeling that even my brain must have decided I was too much. For about a week, I felt nothing. I would carve my nails into my palms just to test it, but it was like that pain didn’t belong to me, like they were somebody else’s hands. And this was a hollowness that freaked the fuck out of me so much that I would have fantasies about hammering my head repeatedly into a concrete wall until it cracked open like a melon just to feel something. And that could be why, when her laughter cuts through my headphones now, because of course it still does, I want to reach down into her throat and rip it out.

My envy forgets its jealousy each time I see her with someone new, and becomes a longing for something other than her. To live inside those hands that reach out to touch with the confidence of a thundercloud, certain of the storm it will rage. To taste teasing invites on my tongue and the sweet flavour of satisfaction when they are inevitably accepted. To swallow that feeling and keep it safe in my stomach so that I will never have anywhere to look but myself if I am ever in doubt that I am good enough to love.

On my worst days, I think that I hated myself just enough to confuse loving something with believing myself not to be worthy of it. On the best, I think she’s a bitch.

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Thank you so much for reading. This was a lot more introspective and less analytical than my usual pieces.

It is my emotional equivalent of Elio staring into the fire and crying at the end of Call Me by Your Name.

Marie xx