melancholy

I Often Imagine the Process of Falling in Love

Artwork by Ellis van der Does

I often imagine the process
of falling in love, a long
essay in textbook science.
Your skin, sugared wild mint.
Adrenaline, I tell myself.

Your hands, new motherland.
Dopamine, I argue silently.

Your laugh, summer rain.
Serotonin, I keep saying.

You see, hungry poets are
always trying to justify
sweaty palms and
racing hearts in
a desperate bid to make
romance romantic
you see, I can think of eighty
metaphors for the butterflies
and the stammering and
my guts on your nylon carpet
but let’s stick to how everything

is just chemical reaction
after chemical reaction

after chemical reaction.
Maybe it’s in the genes,
in DNA, in hormones
maybe it’s in the
limbic processes of the brain
maybe we’ve over glorified
the affairs of Scarlett and Rhett
Sartre and de Beauvoir
Napoleon and Josephine
Paris and Helena
maybe we’re all just
biology’s avant-garde
laboratory experiements

but tonight
as I watch you fast asleep
snoring into your soft blanket
right after a stupid fight
I imagine Marie Curie
keeping
a sample of radium
next to her bed
as night light.

Completely unaware
that this, would
eventually
kill her.

—

Megha Rao is a spoken word poet/surrealist artist based in India.

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