Chemical

There's a moment when she walks into a room

that I have never been able to describe,

it's a drop, it's a lift, it's a rearrangement,

it's the furniture of me getting moved.

Dopamine. Norepinephrine.

Elevated cortisol. Pupil dilation.

A reward-prediction response, functionally identical

to the one produced by nicotine.

And when she's gone a week, there's a weight behind my ribs

like somebody left a stone in the machine,

I don't sleep right, I don't eat, I read her name a hundred times —

Withdrawal.

The pair-bond is metabolically expensive.

Separation distress protects the investment.

This is documented in prairie voles.

So it's chemical! It's chemical!

Fine — it's chemical, and so is the sea,

so is the sun, so is the reason

that you can stand there being right at me!

Everything I've ever felt was chemical,

and every chemical was made inside a star —

so you tell me what the difference is

between the reason and the thing!

There isn't one.

...I know. That's my whole point.

My grandfather forgot his own address in the end,

he forgot the war, he forgot my name, he forgot his hands —

and the last thing standing in the wreckage of that man

was that he still got shy when my grandmother came in.

Last thing to go. Last thing to go.

Now you tell me that was voles.

I will make you an offer.

Define it.

Not the effect. Not the chemistry. I have all of that.

Define the thing itself, in terms that survive translation.

(THE HEART) ...I can't.

(THE SECOND LAW) No.

Nobody ever can.

So it's chemical! It's chemical!

Alright — it's chemical, it's carbon and it's charge,

it's a system doing system things

in a body doing body things at dark —

but he got shy. He got SHY.

At eighty-nine, in a room he couldn't name.

You can have the chemistry, my friend...

(quiet) I'm keeping that.