Beautiful Word

by Ruby Todd

Limerence:  a word invented by psychologist  Dorothy Tennov for

                      the state of deep romantic longing for another person.

If you had asked me what I had done today

I would tell you a few true and flippant things?

danced with my sister around the lounge room to the Motown blues,

poured out a poem on death,

drank wine with my friend Arabella

trying to quantify the time we have lived in light of the time

we have left and later watched the start of a seventies thriller?

but not necessarily in that order.

If you had asked me whether I had thought of you

I could have said something withering

which through the brittle shell outshone

all doubt of the truth?that considering

how thinking of you has become a physical condition,

the native migration of a mind which marks

you as x, the natural half of most equations?

even you, with your grace and your coy deflection, would see

the odds at rest

on the far green

isle of yes.

This is not to say my answering of these imagined questions

would do either of us good. This is not to say

I am at home with this affliction. Limerence

is a beautiful word, not a beautiful condition.

I dwelled in the parenthetical. I had a habit of the hypothetical?

a beautiful condition before it became heretical when

the sorcerer’s show conspired against me; fancy broke free?

the feeling lived on to grow and grow.

If you had asked me, I could have let you know, which is not

to say you would have heard or had any desire to show

limerence can ever be more than a beautiful word, a

beautiful word and a awful condition.

Ruby Todd is a Melbourne-based emerging writer of prose and poetry, currently undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing at Deakin University.