This is going to be short.
I fell out of love today. Now; I don’t want to say with who, because in the end it had nothing to do with any one particular person, but instead has everything to do with a state of mind some call limerence. It’s falling for that dark, handsome, stranger with a cool baritone voice, who makes you feel like you’re the only woman on earth, and yet has a rap sheet the length of a roll of toilet paper. It’s falling for someone who is poorly educated, ignorant, and violent. It’s falling for someone who is vain, and bitter. It’s falling for someone possessed by demons and doesn’t want to be free of them, but who has instead decided to follow them back to hell.
You think of all of those tragic male figures of the Romantic era of English literature, all frozen, hair matted, waistcoat torn, freezing out on the heath. You think, it’s him, back for another go around the karmic wheel in this life, right? In truth what he really is an unemployed bum living in his mother’s basement, or couch surfing at some “friend”, strung out on illegal drugs, his psych meds flushed down the toilet. You wonder if he’s going to be a mass shooter because he fits the profile.
Limerence is when we think, if only they knew the depths of our love, everything would change, everything would be different. Love would change the wild beast, and he would, through the persistence and patience and courage and fortitude you would bring the man from the depths of hell into the land of the living. With the force of your love, you can move this implacable mountain that exists between you and this person.
So you endure the small petty insults, the lack of attention, the cheating, the porn, alcohol and drug addictions, thinking, someday it will all be different. You think, with God’s help, you you can fix the unfixable. And that day does not come. God knows better, but you, no; you have to learn the hard way, don’t you?
Wrong. You wait for baited breath for, for what? A phone call that never comes, a text that is on “read.”
Someone who, never read anything, or listened to anything you said, save for the sound of his own name. Someone who strung you along, and then left you abandoned by the side of the road, clutching an empty bottle of booze, your wallet empty, with no way to get home.
Yet, you can’t believe it. You want to believe that someday, maybe things will be different. And that day never comes.
Not again, you think, not again. What made me think that this time, this time for sure.
After awhile, sometimes it just a few days, other times a few years, you realize that this was not love. This was limerence. This experience was an illusion and the only one that loved anyone was you. But you, no; you were never loved by the object of your obsession. Not for one second.
And then the fog lifts above the heath, sunlight lights the landscape and the horizon, as far as the eye can see. You recognize the fact that you are still standing and because of that you can move on.
But nothing and I mean nothing can compare to the bitterness that comes when the sweet veil of delusion is lifted, and you see the reality of just how desolate the landscape really is. Worse, is you see the ugliness of the demon that nearly took you down with him to the depths of hell without a single word of protest from you.
Yet, where is the apology? The reconciliation? The contrition? Oh, don’t hold your breath that’s not coming. He was onto his next victim long before you got the memo.
A month ago you would have been anxious, upset, barely functioning due to the lack of sleep. But not now. It doesn’t matter, not now.