By Hayli Cox
Content advisory: suicidality
For most of my life I’ve felt love in secret. I let my best friend die in a fire before I ever told her how I felt, how striking her cheeks were where they met her ears—that place I wondered the taste of. I came up with euphemisms for the word, replaced it with xoxo or hearts. I find love you easier if it’s not preceded by I. If you want to know how I feel about you, you have to get me drunk.
Which is why I felt so threatened when I read Dr. Barbara Fredrickson’s research on what she calls “micro-moments of positivity resonance,” those moments that spark, when your blood heats your cheeks and you know you’ve found something right. Microscopic neurotransmitters releasing microscopic chemical love. Micro love. I understood different kinds of affection—how my father would caress a tomato hanging from a vine, how the elderly women I volunteered with could break me with one moment forgotten or remembered. My dog, Sparky. How he licked one side of a popsicle while I licked the other, and how I was once sure he’d become a man and marry me someday.
What frightened me was the thought of love as chemicals. As temporary, as multiple, as inevitable, as infidelity. I remembered the night my high school boyfriend told me I couldn’t hold out anymore. That the smiles I gave to strangers and the compliments I paid to their clothes, their eyes, were all evidence that I was a whore.
*
I started feeling guilty about loving and not loving when I was a child, my momma saying he knows I’m coming home to him when I asked her why she jokes about the man at the bar, calling him her husband. She gave me quarters to put in machines, plastic film from her cigarette cartons to fill with chicklets as she played evening Keno and sipped from a tiny red straw. The time I followed a strange sound through the trailer and found my father crying, reading cards and letters in my mother’s half-cursive. Moving back and forth between homes, sleeping on my uncle’s floor by the couch, listening to my father snore. Uncle Jimmy’s plastic bear full of honey and how I shared all the toys at his house with the dog until we buried him with all the car-chasing dogs who came before.
Apartments and trailers, boxes packed, pets abandoned and every babysitter I ever had. My favorite, Lori, who took us to the park to feed old bread to geese when her abusive husband was home. The time he struck her and the Kool-Aid made the carpet squishy as I tried to pull her up. I remember the girl who always made me play house in my swimsuit, how she said you’re the wife and you have to love me, or we’re not friends and what that meant I had to do. I remember Aunt Ida, who was murdered because she was afraid to be lonely. I remember Forensic Files and Cold Case and beware of sex, money, love. I remember much later, a man on top of me, inside of me, avoiding my lips and I love yous. Another man who climbed up but not down a fire escape and whom I should’ve preferred and who knew how to say I love you back.
*
I am full of walls, but when I’m not careful I make connections too quickly. I remember how I gazed over a cubicle at Nick, passed notes and made him cups of tea, met him at the park all those midnights. Nick had his own personal euphemism for love, derived from the film Scott Pilgrim vs the World. It was us versus the world, pressed close at a Halloween dance not two months before his death. I’d dressed him as an old woman, put blue eyeshadow on his thick lids and flour in his hair. I was a Disney princess in the morning, hair tangled into bedhead and mascara smeared, and he zipped my dress. I told him I hoped he looked that way when he was old. He’d said I can’t wait to see what you look like when we get old. Now, surrounded by intoxicated Vikings and cats and nurses, he dropped the euphemism and told me what he wanted, how he felt. We made so much heat in the crowd that we had to run across the road to Lake Superior. He stripped to his boxers and I ran into the water in my princess gown. I tried to dunk him and he picked me up and threw me, laughing as my body broke reflections of constellations in the dark.
Less than a month later, I told him I was broken, that it wasn’t fair to ask him to fill my cracks. That a person can’t love someone else if she can’t even love herself. He climbed a fire escape two days after his 24th birthday, noon on a Thursday, and the detective called me a contributing factor.
Sometimes I feel safer as a metaphor.
*
It’s the dopamine that causes the high between people, a rewards circuit from prefrontal cortex to nucleus accumbens that helps us forget the danger in it, that breaks the connection from accumbens to amygdala. All these areas of our brain are primitive, all of them old. Add physical contact, and oxytocin builds an attachment, increases the addiction. If we’re lucky, vasopressin keeps the feeling going. But even that is dangerous, because the longer we’re addicted, the harder we crash. The sensation of physical illness brought on by separation, by death.
I wondered if micro love could be the solution to the problem. Taste love. Chew, don’t swallow. I started leaving notes on receipts, leaving scraps of paper in coat pockets, under things that wouldn’t be lifted for months. I started looking strangers in the eye, felt the gaze returned and lengthened. A woman’s red lipstick, the way her eyelashes clump. When I traveled alone to Pennsylvania I spent a weekend with a man who showed me the city and we traded secrets, traded bodies, traded first names. He says, It could be so easy to fall in love with you, and that’s my cue to go. Train back to Michigan, another one-syllable name in my phone and calls gone unanswered. My contacts list proof that I’m damaged goods, a record of people who accelerated contractions in striated muscle below my sternum.
Research suggests you can only love in the presence of someone. They’ve seen proof, neurologists say, in the mirroring lit-up in MRI machines. I convince myself this is untrue, that what I’m experiencing isn’t just withdrawal. That without another body my own isn’t loveless.
*
I had promised Nick, the summer before his death, I’d read him my favorite play, King Lear. I told him it was about an aging, mad king trying to determine which of his three daughters loves him more. Nick said it seemed like all Shakespeare wrote about was love. I think back over more than a dozen plays I’ve read and agree. We decide it’s what most things are about.
Hayli May Cox holds a PhD in Creative Writing with a graduate minor in Women’s and Gender Studies from University of Missouri., in the U.S. She currently serves as Nonfiction Editor at Doubleback Review and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in northern Iowa, though she’s really a Michigander.