Eternal Ephemerals

Chemistry of longing

Sometimes, he wonders if love is simply a misfiring of neurons—an overstimulation of his mesolimbic reward pathway. It might be easier that way, a clinical explanation that dilutes the pain to nothing more than misaligned neurotransmitters. But despite everything he knows about the brain, everything he's studied, it never makes it hurt any less.

She sits across from him in the library, her fingers gliding over the pages of a thick textbook. He imagines, not for the first time, what it would feel like if she touched him with the same gentle curiosity. A cascade of oxytocin—he imagines his hypothalamus surging into action, releasing signals to his pituitary gland, telling it to flood his bloodstream with the warm, aching hormone of connection. The thought makes him swallow, hard.

She looks up and smiles at him. He knows it's just a friendly gesture, but it sets off a chain reaction in his brain—dopamine surging through his ventral tegmental area, rushing to his nucleus accumbens. He shouldn't let it. He knows better. This is how his brain tricks him, leading him down a path that his rational mind knows is a dead end. The amygdala, that primal part of him, lights up at her attention, blind to consequence or rejection.

"Hey, Noah, can you explain this part again?" she asks, pointing at a diagram of a synapse, and for a moment he's lost in the ironic poetry of it—of synapses and connections and her asking him for the secrets of how thoughts move. If only love traveled the same clean, predictable path, one neuron to another, action potentials sparking, all leading to a guaranteed endpoint.

But love, he's come to understand, is not like the orderly synaptic process. It's chaotic, erratic, full of feedback loops that just won't settle down. He leans over, peering at her book, and his heart rate spikes, an autonomic reaction beyond his control. The adrenaline heightens his senses—the soft smell of her vanilla perfume, the way her hair falls like waves across her shoulders, and the warmth of her arm inches from his.

He forces himself to focus, to remember what he's here for. "The neurotransmitters released here..." He points, trying to keep his voice steady, "are picked up by the receptors on the postsynaptic neuron. That's how the message gets across."

She nods, the corners of her lips lifting. "You're a lifesaver, Noah. I don't know how you make this stuff sound so simple."

It's not simple, though. Not at all. He can explain the science to her, can make her see the neat lines of cause and effect, but what he feels is anything but logical. It's messy—a tangle of neurons firing in all directions, signals crossing without clarity. The prefrontal cortex tells him to be calm, to act like the friend she clearly sees him as, but the rest of him won't listen. His limbic system runs rampant, an emotional hijacking he knows better than to succumb to.

"Anytime, Claire," he manages, smiling back. It takes everything in him to not let his voice crack, not to let the longing slip out.

When she leaves, waving over her shoulder, he feels the emptiness settle in again. The reward system in his brain that she unknowingly activated starts to quiet, and the absence leaves a hollow ache. A depletion of dopamine, he thinks clinically, a textbook example of withdrawal. He knows that's all it is, a neurochemical aftermath, but naming it doesn't change it.

He wishes it did. He wishes he could treat this longing like any other neurological issue—a misfire, a chemical imbalance he could adjust with the right treatment. He wishes he could make his pituitary gland stop overproducing oxytocin whenever she's near, wishes he could train his amygdala to stay calm in her presence, to accept that her feelings don't match his, that her synapses don't light up the way his do at the thought of him.

Love is not a misfire, though, and despite all the knowledge he holds about the brain, he's starting to realize there's no simple cure for it. It's an experiment gone wrong, and yet he subjects himself to it again and again.

He packs up his things, staring at the empty seat where she had been. Maybe, he thinks, this is what it means to be human—allowing yourself to feel, even when you know there's no clear resolution. No conclusion to the hypothesis.

Maybe, just maybe, the point is to learn to sit with it, with the maddening chemistry of longing. To accept that some experiments end without results, and yet, the experience of trying matters.

Noah stands, slinging his backpack over his shoulder, and for a moment he wishes that he could disconnect the pathways in his brain that tie him to her. He knows he can't.

Instead, he walks out of the library, allowing himself one last image of her smile—a burst of serotonin, fleeting but warm—and reminds himself that, one day, his neurons might settle, and the aching might quiet. For now, he takes a deep breath, trusting his own resilience, knowing that, even without her, his brain will find balance again.