Weekly Wrapped #56: I’ve Been Dying to Tell Ya

• A funeral-home punchline from my dying father

• The embarrassing things we do for limerence

• Masturbating to the woman I might become

I wake up next to Karen. The room is pitch black and the air conditioning whirs high above our heads. My phone vibrates on the mattress beside me. Time to wake up.

It is just before five o’clock in the morning. I slip from the bed, rub sleep from my eyes, and put on my clothes. Every night before I fly, I meticulously lay out my airplane outfit. I used to do this when I was a girl — laying out my school uniform every night before I fell asleep. Something about it readies me; reminds me that I have somewhere to be, and I know who I will be when I get there.

Which, of course, I do not. I never have.

I force back three, cold, hard-boiled eggs. I am not particularly hungry, and they are overboiled for my liking, but I know I will thank myself in a couple of hours when I am high in the air and far from any food that I’d actually like to eat.

I sneak back into the bedroom.

“I’ll be back soon,” I whisper to Karen. “I love you.”

She grabs my hand, and tries to get up to help me carry my suitcases. I tell her to rest. This is what I am always telling my women: please, please, rest.

In the taxi to the Tunis airport, the driver is listening to the Quran. I weave my hand through the wet wind outside my open window.

When I land in London, I know I am exactly where I am supposed to be.

I wasn’t entirely sure this would be the case, though. When I was here in June, it was raining, and cold, and I felt my heart breaking over men who were always better in my head than in my life. My dad, that first date man, and so on.

I worried that I would, once again, find myself on my knees on the bathroom floor.

Instead, I board the train bound for Peckham and the sun is warm and I chat to the stranger sitting next to me.

Whatever I believed he awakened in me was already stirring. Again I remember: he didn’t awaken me. I was waking, and he walked by.

On Friday morning, I bike to Battersea for Pilates with my favorite instructor, Frankie. The first time we met, we connected over our unisex names, and how frequently people learn our names and say, stupidly, “But that’s a boy’s name?”

When I saw her in June, I said: “I think we should be friends.”

She said, “I was going to say exactly the same thing.”

After class, we go for coffee, and within twenty minutes we’re asking each other about addiction, childhood trauma, and death.

And this is why female friendship is something otherworldly. We waste no time. After all, we have three decades to catch up on.

On Saturday, I wear my zebra print pants and bike to Spitalfields. I meet another internet-friend-turned-IRL-friend for coffee. She is a writer and an editor, and she tells me about her new book, Motherfucked.

We talk about our mothers — the ways they tried, and the ways it didn’t seem to work. We talk about how we might want to mother ourselves one day. We know we will make our own mistakes.

We know that motherhood is equal parts mistake, miracle, and mystery.

On Sunday, I walk silently through Nunhead Cemetery. There are graves so old that the earth beneath them is sinking. A sign nearby reads: some gravesites are unstable, please do not leave the footpath.

I imagine leaving the footpath. I imagine stepping onto unstable ground. I imagine falling into a grave. I imagine my body buried in bones.

I call my dad and he tells me he had an appointment at the funeral home this week.

“Is it strange?” I ask him. “Planning for your own death?”

“I thought of you, and what you said once about ritual,” he says.

“When I walked into the office, there was a sign on the wall that said: when words are not enough, we have ritual.”

I am surprised that he remembers what I said once about ritual. It was two years ago, and I was walking in the woods in Arkansas of all places, and I said, “Ritual is a circle we draw around ourselves to move from one season to another. Weddings, births, deaths.”

Sometimes I convince myself that he has never once heard a word I’ve said. It is a perfect, little thing to realize that he did, sometimes, hear me.

“I was thinking I’d write a book,” he says.

“What would you call it?”

“I’ve Been Dying to Tell Ya.”

I hear his cancer-ravaged lungs rattle as he laughs, and it echoes across the ocean into my ear.

On Monday, I take the train to Notting Hill. I’m probably just ovulating, but I feel more me, and whole, and real. I feel capable of holding the joy and heartache and grief. What a fucking relief.

I arrive at the tattoo shop, and Tal gives me a warm hug.

“Good to see you again,” he smiles. “Ready?”

While he drags a needle across my shoulder, we joke about tattoos from ex-girlfriends and boyfriends, people who get blackout sleeves (something must be wrong with them, right?), and why on earth anyone would ever have their tongue sliced for body modification.

We are laughing so hard I get nervous he might mess up. But while his body moves, his hand remains perfectly steady.

“You and I are too well-adjusted for that,” he jokes. “It’s just not chic at all.”

When he wipes my skin clean, there is a line of crisp cursive crawling up my shoulder:

miracles are often inconvenient, and a prayer is a spell.

A few years ago, I discovered a love for science fiction. I consumed every single Octativa Butler book in mere months. If you haven’t read her trilogy Lilith’s Brood, I implore you to drop everything and run to the library.

When I finished this trilogy, I was hungry for more compelling tales about aliens. But alas, the stories we tend to tell about aliens are more often that not stories of aliens coming to invade the Earth, and humans valiantly saving the day.

A bit unrealistic in my opinion.

Anyway, I found myself turning to films instead, and became obsessed with the movie Arrival.

Then, a few weeks ago, I learned that the movie is actually an adaptation of Ted Chiang’s short story entitled, “Story of Your Life.”

So, if you fancy a beautiful short story about language and aliens and humans, I highly recommend.

Maybe one day I’ll write the alien novel of my dreams.

Over the last few years, I have learned and referred to the term limerence time and time again. It has become one of those pop-psychology words that people like me love to use without ever really stopping to study it.

Dorothy Tennov, the psychologist who coined the term in the 1970s, used limerence to describe the involuntary state we commonly call “being in love.”

But limerence is not quite the same as loving someone.

Love can exist without being returned. You can admire someone, care about their safety and want good things for them without receiving anything in exchange. Limerence, meanwhile, is organized around the possibility of reciprocity. You do not merely want the person. You need some indication that they might want you too.

As I continue reading Tennov’s Love and Limerence, I am sure I will have much more to say on the subject. But I’ll start here:

I had come to understand limerence as something pathological. Something I needed to fix about myself.

Why do I love like this? Why am I so overcome by feeling? Why can’t I get you out of my head?

I become almost ashamed by my own obsession and intensity. Suddenly, one man becomes the channel through which I route every one of my desires.

I have done terribly embarrassing things. I have run past a man’s workplace hoping we might accidentally encounter each other. I have played the piano while imagining a man falling more deeply in love with me as he listened to me sing. I have even lost myself in what Tennov calls “tragic fantasies,” in which something so awful happens to me that the object of my desire is finally forced to make some grand gesture of love.

Embarrassing? Yes.

According to Tennov’s research, also remarkably normal? Yes.

This morning, as I was writing these words, my friend Catherine reminded me of something I once wrote about masturbating to visions of my future self.

On an unbearably hot summer night two years ago, I did exactly that. I was engaged to a man I wasn’t sure I loved, and I had become a shell of myself.

I lay on the couch, unable to bear one more second of his snoring, and masturbated until I came to the vision of myself living in Paris one day.

Just last night, I did the same thing.

With no man to fill the fantasy, I turned toward myself. I imagined who I might be in two more years. What stories and sex and sorrow and strange miracles I might experience between now and then.

Perhaps I do not need to rid myself of the part of me that becomes consumed by possibility.

Perhaps I simply need to become more discerning about where I direct it.

What might happen if I turned that profound infatuation toward myself instead?

• Walking in graveyards

• When a barista asks me, “So, what’re you doing today?” like we’re old friends

• My zebra-print pants

• Learning that zebras are actually black with white stripes

• Watching the World Cup final in a bar with a big group of friends

• How hard we cheered when Enzo Fernández got a red card

• Chocolate mousse