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«J'aimais courir jusqu'à tomber
J'aimais la nuit jusqu'au matin
Je n'aimais rien, non, j'ai adoré
Tu vois, je vous aimais déjà»— Jacques Brel, J'aimais.
Limerence
Limerence is love without the loved one.
English has a noun for unreciprocated feelings: unrequited. Limerence is unrequited love. The term was coined by Dorothy Tennov to distinguish it from love, including romantic love to which it gets very close, except that it must remain frustrated, whereas romantic love can be shared. Tennov says «I first used the term "amorance" then changed it back to "limerence" [...] It has no roots whatsoever. It looks nice. It works well in French.»
The feelings of the loved ones are not returned, either because they remain unsure or are, more commonly, not shared, in which case this can be because such feelings are misunderstood, not believed or simply not wanted. If love is reciprocated, it can become romantic love or passionate love, but it is not limerence anymore. Typically, the limerent holds anything between a figment of intuition to an irrational conviction that something exists that will eventually, somehow, consecrate his perception and make his feelings bloom into the final and ultimate justification of all that he had been feeling up to then.
I have written—and will keep writing in the following—the masculine gender form for the afflicted, although limerence is more prevalent in women (about 60% of the female population experience it, against less than 40% for the male one). This is mainly because much is drawn from my own experience.
Limerence is a mysterious, possibly evolutionary phenomenon, that condemns someone to become intensely infatuated with one particular person, who Tennov calls the Limering Object (LO). Because she is a psychologist—who is precise—and I am merely an onlooker who puts a face behind this letter, I prefer to think that 'O' refers to Obsession instead.
This attachment is exclusive: you only see this person, only want this person, and because this happens independently of your will or control, there is nothing you can do, except enjoy the free fall. You cannot move on, you cannot rationally change your focus and interest to somebody else. The best you can try is to focus on something else instead, something which leaves your LO at the center of everything since that is what she became anyway. You can merely postpone her further into the realm of distant possibilities.
Those are the conclusions already reached by Ovid in his famous 814-line poem—Remedia Amoris—for «you whose love has utterly betrayed you.» The verdict has remained the same for over two millennia now:
(en)
Cedit amor rebus: res age, tutus eris.
This is the best and possibly only efficient advice to deter limerence, or at least not let it turn into a consuming destructive force. Ovid's poem is delightful for its modernity and its straightforwardness, but has little else to offer for deterrence of limerence. It mainly resorts to a whole range of tricks that teenagers recommend to one another as coping mechanism to dodge the abyss that opens where limering strikes. This includes trashing the "object" of affection and turn it into some pathetic, despicable and even disgusting post-coital rebuke, as well as turning to other girls to divert your attention.
But limerence forbids or thwarts this. The obsession is projected onto a single person. And, as theorized by Stendhal through his concept of crystallization, when your love is of the simmering type, even the more off-putting attributes turn into objects of adoration. Not only you do not see their flaws, you come to venerate them as unique particularities of your special beloved one. When you love someone like this, you would eat them. You come to accept, more than tolerate, to integrate their shortcomings just as if they would be your own. This is described by Serge Reggiani in his limering song J'T'aimerais. This is written in the conditional, not the future, to mean "I would love you", implying "if you would let me". The verses are particularly telling:
(en)
J’t’aimerais même avec
La gueule de travers
J’t’aimerais même en mec
Même en militaire
J’t’aimerais même avec
Une bosse dans le dos
Même avec un bec
Même avec des crocs
J’t’aimerais n’importe où
N’importe comment
and the limering sting:
(en)
J’t’aimerais même si tout à coup
Tu m’disais qu’tu m’aimais.
Also of note as a reply from limerence to Ovid, the verses «J’t’aimerais même si tout à coup, J’pouvais faire autrement» (I'd love you even if I could do otherwise) and «[si] J’avais aut’ chose à faire» (even if I had something else to do). There is a French touch in the numerous list of shortcomings that would not deter the lover from his Limering Object: «J’t’aimerais même Anglaise» (I'd love you even if you were English).
This is the sort of extreme acceptation and veneration that one finds in motherly love. This is where the evolutionary scenario might make sense. When you are limerent, you are protected, literally shielded from anybody else's attention. Even a very pretty, alluring and lascivious person becomes to you as attractive as a speck of dust. If anything, that new center of attraction will only remind you, will redirect you to your Limering Object. You will see her again through whoever might claim your attention, because you see her through everything. I am not sure which evolutionary advantage this may bring or in which situation this would be useful, but I cannot imagine anything else as efficient to deter the constant competitions from the genetic pool in which you are bathing. It's not that you have lost interest or are devoid of passion, it is that all of it is exclusively focused on one and only one thing: the limering object. This might be to ensure through hopeless persistence that weird reproductive partners, of great genetic potential, do not get flushed out completely of the mating process by exacerbating their self-protection, coyness, rationality or withdrawal. Without limerence, it might be that idiocracy would have wiped out the human species at the Mesolithic already. I have no data but a hunch that limering objects tend to be hard of access (it requires a bit of resilience to keep a limerent at bay, and without rejection, no limerence). This is another way in which love differs from limerence. I can understand how love can or could accommodate another lover beyond your devoted partner. This is compatible with a rational, measured, controlled expression of one's feelings, in fact, it almost looks like the pinnacle of the art: achieving this sort of control. Limerence is alien to such possibilities, since by its very definition, it is anchored, it is hooked irrationally, against even sensible and logical solutions: if you could detach yourself from—indeed simply replace—your LO, you would not experience or, in this case, suffer from limerence. Love can be pragmatic, judicious, reasoned, analytical, lucid, balanced. Limerence cannot. This type of grip is so strong that even Ovid concedes that in some (limering) cases, such diversions provide no escape:
(en)
Non tamen huic nimium praecepto credere tutum est:
Fallit enim multos forma sine arte decens.
In more poetic fashion, he observes rightly that a remedy to love, when it is a remedy to limerence, faces the all-encompassing embrace of innumerable arts bringing back the limering obsession at its central spot of every preoccupation:
(en)
Artibus innumeris mens oppugnatur amantum,
Ut lapis aequoreis undique pulsus aquis.
This is what makes limering grounded elsewhere. Love is controlled, mature, wanted and regulated. It is fulfilled and in the present. Limerence is suspended in the forever future. One is usually in love with someone without being limerent about them. That requires composure, restraint, understanding and rationality. If you "merely" love, and if this person does not want or reciprocate your love, by the very characteristic of being in control, you either cease to express or entertain such feelings, or you do so in a peaceful and accepting fashion. Limerence, on the other hand, explodes into obstination, longing, lingering, and an unending succession of hope and despair. I suppose that you can also love being limerent, but then as a transition or in an exhausting, self-consuming process that probably leads to insanity. You enter a positive feedback which can only last for a short period of time—the time for the reciprocation to stabilize and make way for love—or for something tragic and excessive to wreck the transition and bring you to still other territories.
Limerence is interesting because it is at the frontier between a mental sickness and a supernatural experience, a mortal venture into heaven. Limerence is an open door to a form of synesthesia. Everything makes sense, everything points to her, everything explains what she does and the world is explained by what she could do. It can be seen as the poor man's version of synesthesia.
It is embarrassing to be the Limering Object of someone. There is of course an element of flattery and surprise at first, but since on the other side you find claims of eternity and absolutes, you confront yourself with being overloaded out of the blue (limerence comes out of nowhere and from where you least expect it) with the weight of the universe that someone suddenly puts on you. You became something much beyond a little people with their own life and worries, own infatuations maybe, you became the motive, agent and destination of someone with dead-serious intentions of reaching the stars together. That's a long way to go when you have other plans for the rest of the week-end.
I have been the LO of at least two people. One was called Raphaelle, the other was called Ulrike. As a good Limering Object, I did not reciprocate their feelings, but I felt that they were both genuine and out of proportion. I am not writing this as the LO, because I know that the LO is not important, that they feel very little as compared to the limerent, who gets to experience the whole gamut of torments and ecstasy that is accessible to the human brain.
It is not uninteresting to be part of limerence from the receiving end, but you get the dwarfed version of events. You witness, in a mix of perplexity, superiority and desolation, the intensity that shakes a fragile, desperate and dependent soul. You become the immensity of the sea which, in a corner of its expansion, has trapped a little boat that gets to feel all the excitement, fear, highs and downs of a tempest which, for you, is an irrelevant corner of your daily routine.
The LO then has to choose whether to be cold, brutal, patronizing, upset or, worst of all, sympathetic and collaborative. The last option is the worst, because the central mechanism of limerence is to shape the universe to set the stage for its limering object at the center of it, and if you, as the LO, would make the mistake of climbing the stairs to go in its limelight—even if for curiosity or for fun, in most cases by mere politeness or innocent courtesy—you have confirmed the limerent in their conviction that you are the one for them, they are the one for you. I have, myself, been a charitable and benevolent limering object. But that is a misuse of your burden, because unless limerence is a detour towards reciprocal romantic love, it cannot feed from measured, tempered, reasonable and altruistic considerations and good-will. You cannot fulfil someone who asks you to become the universe with merely time, friendship, affection, understanding, commiseration, attention or even intimacy, attachment or bonding. It's an all or nothing transaction, and throwing scraps to a fire only fuels it. When heat becomes too intense, you have to withdraw and let someone else get devoured on their own by the blaze which you have let them ignite in their heart. The limering object then becomes estranged, alienated from and wary of their limering aspirant.
Limerence is not pathological, nor is it dangerous. It feeds on the honest perception of what-ifs, on hopes and on a boundless optimism, the one animated by the most noble and unshakable motives. Therefore, the best cure for limerence is for the limering object to make absolutely clear that they have no interest in being someone's vision of the universe. This is how I got myself rebuked from my limering obsession after she understood that I was reading that every little thing she does is magic:
(en)
Todas las siguientes declaraciones son inequívocas, en modo indicativo, sin segundas lecturas y en frases cortas: ...
Surgical. What followed was excruciating to read but of the sort of pain that removes the splinter from an open wound. It removes an alien element from your being: it's not love that was planted in your heart and soul and were bound together in you, but limerence. When the person you want more than anything else tells you: I don't want you, you awake from a dream. The dream was tender and soothing, but if you are not crazy, you can appreciate the restored steadiness of a world that ceased to spiral upward and that regained a bit of its stability. There follows a long, bittersweet process of mixed feelings. Denial lurks in the shadow of your mind, relapses into the intoxicating euphoria of visions of beautiful new horizons resurface, memories visit you with their cortege of melancholy, nostalgia and past elation... but they are merely simmering in a sea of restored banalities that is cooling off. My Limering Obsession made the technical mistake of adding to her list of clarifications that «Dicho lo cual...» (This being said...) This wiped out everything. All the medicine was regurgitated into a conviction that, after all, she was, at some stage, in some way, in one interpretation of all the possible declinations of complex, repressed, yet-undiscovered ramifications of her own doubts and uncertainties and mysteries, she was out there with me lost in the big sky. «Artibus innumeris mens oppugnatur amantum. Dura fatemur».
There are countless aspects that make limerence interesting. Possibly one of the most interesting experiences which you can get to go through. Limerence is superior to love, because it encompasses love as a subset, although it still fails to capture it. I might have experienced limerence as a child. I suspect all children do. It was short, innocent, intense but brief. I was fortunate not to experience it as a teenager or young adult, which is possibly when many get to toy with the phenomenon. But I also experienced it at a late stage of life. Mind you, I'm experiencing it now. My limering object, the one that recriminates me in Spanish, she poured the half-burnt gasoil on my open wounds just days or weeks or months or years ago. It all seems an eternity that wrapped itself up in a singularity out of time. I'm writing this as a coping mechanism, trying to look at myself from the altitude of rationality and detachment, to try to understand something complex, rich, intense from inside. I hope this is acceptable to you, my reader. Note that Ovid himself procured his ailment not only as a "doctor" but as a patient of his own medicine, foremost:
(en)
Haeserat in quadam nuper mea cura puella:
Conveniens animo non erat illa meo:
Et, fateor, medicus turpiter aeger eram.
It might be I'll be missing it when it'll have finally subsided. If I could wipe it out by snapping fingers, I would, I definitely would, but I might still want to hold onto my crossed fingers the time to make sure that, despite all odds, against all evidence, the infinitesimals, the surreal numbers with which you can still make algebra between zero and the first ε, do not leave me with one last, one unique, one miraculous exception.
Limering is not less than the driving power behind most of the artistic pursuit of expressing love. Love that is fulfilled does not need being turned into verses: it is enough to just consume it. Only when it escapes you, there is the need to run after it, and this pursuit is what demands strategies, understanding, testimonies of failed or frustrated attempts. There is much confusion between love and limerence because most of what artists tackle in their plea for bonding, for embraces, for fusion, is directed towards limerence but the public instead files it under love.
Which type of love is Madness talking about when they say that what they feel must be love, nothing more, nothing less:
And I never thought I'd feel this way
The way I feel about you
[...]
As soon as I wake up every night, every day
I know that it's you I need to take the blues away
[...]
It must be love,
Nothing more, nothing less.
It is clearly something more than love, which is also less at the same time, because it did not reach it: limerence.
In the rest of my introspection, I want to relate how limerence pervades art in general and popular songs, in particular.
Anything that celebrates love can be possessed by the limerent too. The reciprocation, if it is not there, can be imagined, fantasised or believed instead. The impact of some positive signal from the Limering Object is amongst the most powerful feelings that can be felt by the human soul, something which love itself only remembers, from its limering stage.
French wisdom well captured that:
Le meilleur moment de l'amour, c'est quand on monte l'escalier.
Limerence is an unending stairway to heaven: you never get there. You enjoy the bliss of the ascension forever. Because dopamine is a strong chemical and a heavy drug for the brain, limerence however can lead to exhaustion, loss of focus, rêveries... the type of idleness so well captured by Ovid in his cure for love. One needs to either withdraw or ignore it. If tolerated, or accepted, or endured in some sort of suspended resignation and patient deference for the end of time, when everything will be revealed, it can form the sort of chivalrous love whereby one asks nothing of his limering obsession but the knowledge and acceptance that she has this role in his destiny. To give him ardour to fight the dragons. To accompany him as he meets with his annihilation in war or sacrifice.
One recurrent trait of limerence is that, even in proud and arrogant people, it instills extreme modesty, to the point of self-deprecation. You are, after all, confronting yourself with the highest possible form of what is not, but could be, within your reach. As high a target as you can put it. Anything higher than your limering object would be delusion. Anything calibrated to the human's reach, at the exact interface between the possible and the inconceivable, is limerence. It is the meeting point of the absurd with the miracle. It is what allows you to endow yourself with the greatest extension of your being. And since that is not much anyway, in the face of what you envision, that calls for considerable humility and coyness, even if you know that you are needed for the symphony:
I associate love with red
The color of my heart when she's dead
Red in my mind when the jealousy flies
Red in my eyes from emotional ties.
Brel has described most of the deepest feelings that can either embrace or torture someone, and many of his songs touch upon limerence, but some more directly or brutally than others. The most spot-on is Madeleine, named after a woman's first name, as all limerence journeys do. It is not his best or most beautiful song, but it is the most exact. It opens with the exhilarated triumph of someone waiting for his sweetheart, full of projects and bliss. The atmosphere is joyful, the singer is full of optimism. This is love. But Madeleine does not show up, and one follows the hero in his long, inexorable, pathetic descent into frustration and despair, as all possible things to do become, one after the other, missed, lost or squandered. He confesses that everybody tells him this is not going to work and even he knows all too well that she is not coming, that she was never coming. But of course, after the slow change of register, after the gleeful songs turned into laments, just when we think we have witnessed the inexorable recognition that this is broken, but at least, will remain shattered on the floor, then the last strophe reminds us what precise phenomenon we are witnessing, by reviving the mood of the narrator even more victoriously than in the first one. Limerence strikes his heart like a match and, igniting a memory or intuition, the loop repeats once more. It will repeat forever, each time intensifying. The shout of the final strophe—«Madeleine, elle aimera ça» (Madeleine, she'll love it)—is the voice of limerence itself, shouting at every limerent, just with a different name: She stays with you. Today. Tomorrow. Forever.
Another song, slightly less aligned as it involves or at least suggests elements of active reciprocation, which is typically absent in limerence, is Mathilde. Another first name, another poem. Mathilde comes back and «Jacques retourne en enfer» (Jacques goes back to hell). He reminisces over all the torments he suffered because of his attachment to Mathilde, and how he is about to go through all of that again due to idealization and hope returning. Very limerent. Note that although we are being told that Mathilde is coming back, we never actually see her and nothing happens but in the narrator's vision of the future. It could therefore also be that Mathilde is, like Madeleine, not coming at all and one is witnessing an even more severe and more pure form of limerence. The song is, in fact, much more tortured and possessed than the tender resignation of the previous one, here being on the verge of insanity. Most of the song is the hero struggling to resist the temptation to engage again. Whether this engagement is delusional or real remains untold. In the meantime, he calls upon both external and internal help—his mother, his friends, people around—but those are helpless and discarded in a few lines. The real struggle is with himself, within himself. Two paragraphs are devoted to the fight with his own organs and appendages. One is a dialogue with his heart:
(en)
Mon cœur, mon cœur ne t'emballe pas
Fais comme si tu ne savais pas
Que la Mathilde est revenue
Mon cœur, arrête de répéter
Qu'elle est plus belle qu'avant l'été
La Mathilde qui est revenue
Mon cœur, arrête de bringuebaler
Souviens-toi qu'elle t'a déchiré
La Mathilde qui est revenue
The other is a supplication to his hands. Replying to his implications, comes the same, unique, obvious, stubborn, limering reply: "Mathilde is coming back!"
(en)
Et vous mes mains, restez tranquilles
C'est un chien qui nous revient de la ville
Mathilde est revenue!
Et vous mes mains, ne frappez pas
Tout ça ne vous regarde pas
Mathilde est revenue!
Et vous mes mains, ne tremblez plus
Souvenez-vous quand j'vous pleurais d'ssus
Mathilde est revenue!
Vous mes mains, ne vous ouvrez pas
Vous mes bras, ne vous tendez pas
Sacrée Mathilde puisque te voilà...
After Madeleine and Mathilde, comes Marieke whose limerence seems to be, however, so private and out of reach that it is sung in Dutch:
(en)
Zonder liefde warme liefde
Lacht de duivel de zwarte duivel
Zonder liefde warme liefde
Brandt mijn hart mijn oude hart
A way to transcend limerence is to absorb it as part of something greater, grander. This requires chivalrous efforts but if you can spin your story this way, you can touch the sky. With Brel, this makes the theme of L'homme de la Mancha. In the keynote song, La Quête, every line is beautiful, every line is perfect, every line is a poem:
(en)
Rêver un impossible rêve
Porter le chagrin des départs
Brûler d'une possible fièvre
Partir où personne ne part
Aimer jusqu'à la déchirure
Aimer, même trop, même mal
Tenter, sans force et sans armure
D'atteindre l'inaccessible étoile
Telle est ma quête
Suivre l'étoile
Peu m'importent mes chances
Peu m'importe le temps
Ou ma désespérance
Et puis lutter toujours
Sans questions ni repos
Se damner
Pour l'or d'un mot d'amour
Je ne sais si je serai ce héros
Mais mon cœur serait tranquille
Et les villes s'éclabousseraient de bleu
Parce qu'un malheureux...
Brûle encore, bien qu'ayant tout brûlé
Brûle encore, même trop, même mal
Pour atteindre à s'en écarteler
Pour atteindre l'inaccessible étoile.
Every line is limerence. Through this melancholic and, at the same time, fervent and exulting song, one, maybe, finally vanquishes limerence, one gets the better of it and tames it like Michael slays the dragon.
Brel being Brel, in his universality, besides approaching the theme repeatedly and from various sides, including winning the case with the previous song, he also penned one more honest, more realistic, one that encompasses everything at all stages of life: J'Aimais. This tender song of Brel is possibly his most far-reaching one. It consists in reminiscences of what the narrator experienced in preparation for love, and how this already put him in all the variations of all the possible moods one gets to experience when going down the limerence road. Each strophe starts with the sentence that is also the title of the song, in the past tense. Each also concludes and is summarized by a direct address, this time in the present tense, that goes «Tu vois» (you see) in the familiar, singular thou form, and proceeds, back to the past tense, «je vous [...] déjà» (I already [...] about/with/for you) but this time in the deferential, plural you form, alternating or confronting familiarity with deference, as well as connecting one limering object to the universality of all women and, through the tense declinations, also the one successful, exceptional connection contemplating the universal failure.
This starts with magic and enchantment of early childhood, «je vous rêvais déjà» (I was dreaming of you already). Then follows the ascension in life, the formative years, school, in anticipation of what is promised, «je vous guettais déjà» (I was waiting for you already). Then the teen-ages and young adulthood, with sensual love, where he demonstrates a wonderful and masterful poetical euphemism to describe the woman's body in terms of the sea, trees and the ocean, yet with explicit and graphic metaphors, concluding «je vous savais déjà» (I was knowing you already). The next one is the elevation: love in all its purity and majesty, in the sublimation of its negation, the one strophe for which the concluding verse uses the special word, the title, the recurring motif: «je vous aimais déjà» (I was loving you already). Then follows passion, the tearing apart, the destruction, the obsession, with «je vous brûlais déjà» (I was burning for you already). This is followed by grief, sorrows and misery, «je vous pleurais déjà» (I was weeping for you already). Limerence ends in tragic, lonely and ugly desolation. Brel becomes Ovid and gives us his last strophe, where we find alcohol, dissolute life, entertainment, and, in the words of the poet, prostitutes or casual flings, as «laides de nuits» (ugly at night). This is another poignant, painful strophe. The Remedia Amoris. The last line brings the conclusion that awaits any limerence at the end of its lifelong pursuit: «je vous oubliais déjà» (I was forgetting you already).
(en)
J'aimais les fées et les princesses
Qu'on me disait n'existaient pas
J'aimais le feu et la tendresse
Tu vois, je vous rêvais déjà
J'aimais les tours hautes et larges
Pour voir au large venir l'amour
J'aimais les tours de cœur de garde
Tu vois, je vous guettais déjà
J'aimais le col ondoyant des vagues
Les saules nobles languissant vers moi
J'aimais la ligne tournante des algues
Tu vois, je vous savais déjà
J'aimais courir jusqu'à tomber
J'aimais la nuit jusqu'au matin
Je n'aimais rien, non, j'ai adoré
Tu vois, je vous aimais déjà
J'aimais l'été pour ses orages
Et pour la foudre sur le toit
J'aimais l'éclair sur ton visage
Tu vois, je vous brûlais déjà
J'aimais la pluie noyant l'espace
Au long des brumes du pays plat
J'aimais la brume que le vent chasse
Tu vois, je vous pleurais déjà
J'aimais la vigne et le houblon
Les villes du Nord, les laides de nuit
Les fleuves profonds m'appelant au lit
Tu vois, je vous oubliais déjà
Such a powerful, penetrating, insightful poem. Everything was written, everything will happen, one thing after the other, to end up in decay, dismissal and forsaking. The best one can do is drape our experience of it with beautiful words and profound feelings. This text is the most truthful and complete allegory of limerence.
At least the limering and their object have one consolation, they don't hold hands but in the company of beautiful, eternally broken couples—not even broken—unformed couples. The union of togetherness with separation. The revenge of the limerent: I could not love you but still could possess you. You could not love me but still possessed me. The etymology, the meaning differ, but it is still the same word. I made you mine, the time of an elation. You had me fully, even if you did not want to, did not care or did not even know. You and me, as well as all of them, we may or may not have existed, it doesn't matter, as our non-existing union is the only reality, immaterial of the supports.
Petrarch and Laura.
Apollo and Daphne.
Echo and Narcissus.
Clytie and Helios.
Pygmalion and Galatea.
Orpheus and Eurydice.
Pururavas and Urvashi.
Abelard and Heloise.
Stendhal and Métilde.
Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb.
William Butler Yeats and Maud Gonne.
Romeo and Juliet.
The Great Gatsby and Daisy.
Cyrano and Roxane.
Quasimodo and Esmeralda.
Simon and Elea.
Dante and Beatrice.
John Keats and Fanny Brawne.
Charlotte Buff and Goethe. (Werther and Charlotte).
...
...
...
I suspect, I suppose, that limerence can sometimes break through, especially if this is the result of some evolutionary glitch. We have survived as the species that we are now—one still replete with poets, broken hearts and hopelessly convinced souls that they are not alone—because some of our limerent ancestors have sprinkled the genealogy tree of humanity with sparse but important branching trees that glitter in our past like stars in the firmament. Some of us made it. Not me. But some have been able to extend their hands to the moon and feel the grip of the moonlight pull them up. Some have hoped so much, have loved so much, even if too much, even if badly, some have cried so excessively that their pain resonated like a prayer and their sorrows condensed into an ointment with which an angel celebrated an impossible union.
And for the others, those—the majority—who will remain sitting on the side of the road looking at someone passing by, and failing to reach them at this precise, short moment of a missed encounter, when they were at arm's length, when they exchanged a look, maybe, but to be left after that and forever with the receding image of this vision once incarnated almost on their lap, now so far away but still never disappearing, forever slowing down as it dies into the horizon; for those, indeed, subsequently walking down a route that nobody else has taken or wants to take with them, until they resolve to come back, or bifurcate again into an avenue more popular, where they can take the hand of anybody, of whomever; for those, finally, who kept pursuing the horizon until they also disappeared from sight... if not all of them, if not even most of them, but some of them still left us with a vague notion of what things might be, what this could all be about, when one walks so far in the pursuit of what they have seen inside themselves through the unuttered whispers of someone else, until the point where the rest of creation never saw them again:
(en)
Il ne sait de l'amour
Que le verbe "s'aimer"
Sur le pont n´est plus rien
Qu'une brume légère
Ça s'oublie en silence
Ceux qui ont espéré.
Their pain is gone with them, but they still left us something. Think of all the art, all the music, all the songs, all the paintings, all the literature, all the poems. All this excruciating pain, all these delicious torments, all this loneliness in the company of the universe, probably it was worth it, because for those who don't get to experience it firsthand, they are still gifted through the tears of others that imprinted something on paper, with a notion, a vision, a confidence of the ineffable bliss of loving something so big that it could not be embraced.
For all the reasons that I have touched upon above, at the same time that I wish myself out of it, whether you make it or not, I wish you limerence.