On Limerence: I Have Never Been In Love, Just Inane

a wise woman once said

“A crush is just a lack of information.”

The night spoiled just like the wine had, and I thought about love, then, and all the nights I’d spent dreamy-eyed in Saint Augustine, convinced I was somebody’s soulmate. 

It was always by painstaking design, these times, of course no one ever registered as an actual guy with a blood type and a workplace management preference and a proclivity to temper tantrums when they lost their keys or hadn’t eaten or drank too much the night before.

I dressed up every misapprehension and danced with it, held it close even when it spun me around, and you’d have danced with it too, you would have, past the ornate rooms and tangle of wild dreamscapes and into the world outside, right into the hole carved clean into the dirt. 

“Baby, let’s go to Hell,” Glitter where my eyes should be. 

“I love them,” I’d tell myself, “No, you don’t.” I’d taunt back. But I did! I did! This was the last thing they broadcasted when the world ended, on a loop on all Western radio and TV and Bluetooth compatible devices until they ceased to work or exist.

Because what do you mean none of it was real? It had to be! “Look at the sky! Look at this sunset that I’ve painted!”

There are no windows in this room. You can’t reach the ceiling, they’re double-height, the luxury kind, see?

That’s madness! No, really, you must not be seeing what I’m seeing, raw and real, it couldn’t exist only in the pretense of maladies and sad dreams. If it wasn’t real, then I’m twelve in my bedroom talking to ghosts again, waiting for my mom to come home and my dad to call but the front door never unlocks in the foyer and my cellphone, the house phone, they never ring. “No, look!”

Listen to me, this is an airport. A hotel hallway. An arcade-themed dive bar. This isn’t an art studio. This isn’t Soho, remember? You haven’t been in New York in a long time. 

“New Y-But the paint on my hands-it’s red! And I’m undone! And don’t you see this mess I’ve made?”

I’ve never been in love, I’ve just been bored. 

The hardest truths come from your subconscious handing you one of those extravagant, princess-esque mirrors in the middle of an otherwise great-going party. 

Daunting: all the longing I’ve pretended to possess, over the years.

Too much time on my hands and too many little worlds beneath them, see, so I paint a portrait with oil colors and a canvas and a stack of brushes that are not there—the materials do not exist—and they should call it psychotic, every car that I’ve ever been in the passenger seat of past-midnight is just somebody else I’ve manipulated. It’s only ever just a game; I always win and I always pretend that I lose. “Feel bad for me!” And you always do.

I’m incapable of heroines and biblical credibility and taking the victim complex out of the closet—no, it will stay there as long as I do.