LIMERENT LIGHT CONES

“Love is not a god at all, but is rather a spirit that mediates between people and the objects of their desire.” 

 Plato, The Symposium 

My limbs are pressed into bedsheets by the weight of the night and stuck there, askew but faintly twitching, by thin veneers of sweat that blur me into the now-dark grey bedsheets like a spider flattened underfoot into concrete or carpet and unravelled into a paste, half alive with three faintly quivering legs. Soon even that will stop, and the vestiges of vitality will decay and whatever it is that constitutes a spider’s soul will vacate, leaving a vessel that holds nothing but the night and the memory of a hollow life. I am tangled in and through the covers and my hair is looped around my neck. I am waking up from a dream of her.  

I wander Ulyssean in some halcyonic daze through a street I can’t name but know in my bones, I wander free and floating through scenes and strangers, following faint scents that invoke a gnawing incompleteness in me that transudes into hunger––yes I am alone and it is a cool night like the one which called me to dream, and in this night like a fugue I am compelled by that hunger, and I approach a door, a dark wood door with floral motifs and I reach my hand to the dull shine of the bronze doorknob and crack it open, letting the warmth of it all seep through me, the sounds and light constitute the scene and I am shaking there holding it and holding in, still half in half out between the street and the beyond-door, I am stuck in some metaxyc un-re-becoming, and the hunger is deep now and it’s past my stomach, I feel it ritualised in all organs and organelles, now temples to desire, a burning flame that melts my limbs and welds me to the world, opening up myself and the room and then I am through the doorway and in the restaurant and it is still all so bright, and the laughter and the sounds are iridescent in that moment, thin needles that pierce my skin, sending pulses of heat through me, and my gaze is captured by the wine glasses like bloodied icebergs that jut out from the milky blue tablecloths and napkins and I have just crossed over the boundary but the door is still open, the street is still behind me, and Night my warden has her hand outstretched, and as the static of the scene, the fibrous network of colour and sound that grates against me, begins to fade in the echoes of a single instant, I make out figures and forms demarcated from the burnt orange wall and its franco-Vietnamese-cornices, I see gray-gummed smiles and eyes drowned in wrinkles, I see a dewy-eyed child frozen in stasis, a geometric figure half traced between her fingertips. I see it all before I see her.  

O my faun my hunter you are the soul of the whole room yes there is something in you in the curves of your cheekbones and the strands of hair; in pearlescent earrings, in the corners of your face in you, you are the edelweiss on the acme of Qaf or Meru and I see you inside me and your laughter is like sweet rain gliding down pastoral mountains—I am in the doorway a distance of centuries away and my heart beats god it beats over and over and over and over, a thousand times in a fraction of a second and I am looking at her through the pounding in my chest like one looks at the clouds through a window, but my heart is still beating and I look at her deeply and truly––a limerent light cone extends like the dawn, and I run from it I run as fast as I can into the street out the door before it closes. All this is in the space between seconds oh yes it is all relative and my heart is beating a million times an instant, and I am like the Simurgh, I am the hummingbird of hummingbirds of hummingbirds, twitching and pulsating infinite enough that it is all frozen to me, infinite enough that the light cone, the radiating causality of burning desire, lags behind my body lags behind my desire. 

I suppose the fundamental force of all dreams is desire, that the figures in its mirror are woven from the bitter collisions of desires and fears. My wanting stretches out in front of me and shakes the world, yes, in a dream limerence forms lightcones and every worldline is a suicide. 

I am in the street again and I am escaping in an instant, and as I look over my shoulder I see the door half open or half shut, and I see the permeating light cone—from this angle a sphere, and I am stumbling and gasping, heaving out sharp ragged breaths that vibrate to the incessant kinetics of my heart and my feet are scraping the concrete and the streetlamps taunt me and the lightcone like Achilles is gaining on me, until I reach the restaurant over and its door, dark blue old and smooth, and I press on it with my hands and again I am inside the glaring warmth and again I am confronted with a world outside myself, outside the street, and I see the faces of strangers like paper cut-outs animated by the wind and then I see her, I see her again and I can’t bear to look at her—no, I can’t bear to look at her looking at me—I leave through the sliver of a door and I am seized by the cool of the night and the voices of the restaurant fade behind me, and in the fuzzy streetlamps I see an endless procession of doors cascading around me, and I see the lightcones, two of them, desires emanating and crescending, from the pair of half open doors like lovers in a waltz.  

I reach for another door but I know what is behind it, I know she is behind it, and I know desire has fangs that bite and I bleed, I bleed like molasses all slow and warm, and it pools in the street glistening red under the ever-expanding lightcones, and I’m drowning in it, in desire, and the doors and trees and sovereign night are all in her image and it is like this that I am crushed underfoot, pressed into the street, and I awake still mangled, flattened, and shivering—I am a once-spider stain and I am clinging to her, to it all.