Lesbian Limerence
on where love goes when she's lost... and a letter to my former self
Nothing about love has ever been easy. That’s not the nature of her curse. Love is inevitable, unavoidable, and a familiar emotional home to me. When I was little, I thought I would have to beg people to love me at all. For a long time, as a child, I felt as though I had to grovel for attention, even from those whose duty it was to take care of me. There’s a quote by Fiona Apple where she reflects on her childhood and the feeling of being unwanted. She states “When I was a kid… the thing I most strongly wanted in the world was a best friend… I felt like I was just a sad little boring thing” I relate strongly to this sentiment and even as an adult who knows the tumultuous highs and lows of love — what it means to be loved and love back — I often have to stop myself from feeling like that little version of myself who felt so desperately unwanted.
Love never goes away. Love is like matter. It cannot be extracted from reality, instead, it is formed into something else — love is never depleted, it simply takes another form.
For somebody who feels as intensely as I do, as often as I do, I love hard. When I no longer have the opportunity to show my love, my missed opportunities, my miscommunications, and my “I miss you”s devour me from the inside out. I’m a hopeless romantic. I don’t know how hopeless romanticism can be when the goal of my hope is never defined. I can watch all the romcoms I want but more than I yearn for their romance, I yearn to time travel back to my first viewing of these films.
Dear 17-year-old Maya,
the permanence of the feeling of pain is all you know. Take care of yourself. Even though your body and mind carry all your hurt, they’re worthy of gentle and caring love — not the pain you feel you deserve.
One day someone will love you despite you annoying them furiously. In fact, many hearts will learn to love you, and the fullest version of yourself at that.
You like to sit around watching romcoms, hopeless and cynical, secretly hoping that one day someone’s daughter would grow up to love you like that. You’ll never lose your sense of tenderness and tendency to yearn as you learned from Duckie Dale. No “Pretty Woman” is going to make you climb a fire escape to convince her of your love, but you’ll find yourself feeling like you might as well anyhow. Lesbianism will lead you to places a Hollywood romcom couldn’t imagine in the next 7 decades.
Dear 13-year-old Maya:
The world will not end because you just broke up with a girl for the first time. God didn’t smite you when he found out you were gay, the world didn’t actually end in 2012, and you have got to get a grip!
It is never OK to let anybody put their hands on you. Not even your petite girlfriend. Your first girlfriend should teach you how to love and give you some type of sappy, immature, sapphic experience. not bruises on your arms when she’s mad. Just because she’s smaller than you and angry, does not mean she can put her hands on you. One day you’ll see her for the last time. And one day she’ll lay her hands on you for the last time and you will never look back.
The world does not end at 13 because of some girl! You will find love that loves you back in the way you deserve. You will experience love that doesn’t come with a punch in the shoulder. I know you don’t believe me now, but you’ll live to see it.
Dear 11-year-old Maya,
people exist in this world who love and care about you before and after they know who you are. Despite your hesitancy in believing this, it will be undeniably true. It will be a loud truth, all in due time.
Charlotte, North Carolina is not your forever home. In fact, it was never your home in the first place.
You will not die here and you will not be buried here. The city felt like a death sentence from the second that you stepped into it, I know you were scared. Love exists beyond where you are now.
The world does not end at 11: sad, alone, unaware of the joys of true friendship or even respect from your community. I know you feel alone right now, but this too shall pass. I know you hate yourself now, but please give yourself a chance to love a community of people who love and adore blackness, queerness, transness, and marginalization alike. You’ll find there are reasons to stay alive everywhere. They exist inside the hearts of those that you love, that love you back tenfold.
Since I've grown into myself, I have learned of love. She and I have a nuanced and neurotic relationship, but nevertheless, her existence in my life persists through the horrors.
I’m yearning prone, accustomed to limerence, and comfortable with obsessive love. When I feel, I feel full of myself. From my fingertips to my heart, I can assure you that if I love you, your name brought up in conversation is enough to bring me boundless joy. When I love you, when I truly and deeply envelop myself in your devotion, love is like a religion to me. You’re the idol at my altar.
When love is lost it does not deplete, It simply changes form.
Where does love go when it is lost but not dead?
When love is lost, it may venture its way to the underworld, a hell in which bad feelings and hatred exist. Hate exists in a hellscape of human emotion, resentment is where love goes when it’s hurt. Love dawns a bright, shining, blinding armor of sheer white hatred when love is wounded enough to wander so far.
When love is lost, it may ascend into a perfect paradise of memory. When love is lost it may wander into a safe haven – heaven in your mind where you can remember it as perfect in order to comfort yourself. In your memory, love exists as a shrine to what once was. It can no longer hurt you.
When love is lost, it might wander its way into your chest at the times that you least expect it. It crawls into your ribcage, tugs on the tendons aligned in your aortic root, and brings you to tears. It sickens your stomach. It might even lower you to your knees. Maybe in pleading for mercy from a higher power. Maybe because your legs could no longer hold the weight of your heart.
Love is sick like that. When she enters she has absolutely no intention of leaving. Love steps into a room like she owns it, placing herself in your heart she holds no regard for what you want, she, and only she, knows what you need. Love is the controlling grasp your feelings have over your emotions, warm, clammy, and not letting go anytime soon.
Love and I know each other well, as she and I have met in every lifetime. Love does not escape me, sometimes she just gets lost on her way home.
