#61 The anatomy of a crush

about feeling so high school

Goosebumps. Electric! Skin feels prickly, like a live wire, at the thought of them. The excitement and mania! Deep in the fantasy, these crushes can’t disappoint you. Why do they call it a crush? AH! I remember. Because the line between high hopes and the crash out of delusion is a thin one. Crushed by your adoration and overly invested in your imagined version of them, a crush is an intense energy source from which to draw inspiration. Suddenly, everything is beautiful and bright, dazzling! It hurts your eyes a little. All this pent-up energy has to go somewhere. Going for long walks. Rediscovering a long-lost hobby. Creating something new. Watching romantic comedies. You sigh more heavily and think more dreamily because the object of your affections and every obsession is so unreachable but also so close. It creeps up on you, the crush, and the intoxication of a crush is something not to be played with. Bittersweet sixteen again! Feeling so high school again!

Crushes inspire us to write in our notebooks and add a little extra sparkle to our outfits if we know we're going to see them, secretly yearning for a second look - a hey you look nice - a hint of a smile - an acknowledgement of sorts - they’re at least a little bit as affected as you are by being near them. And when it’s a bad case of the crush… even remembering to breathe properly gets a little hard! It gets caught in your throat when you see them dancing, hypnotic, or by the bar, or on the street, or walking past each other to the coffee machine early in the morning. (I’ve had a million crushes and I am certain I will have a million more).

Then — the next inevitable stage of the crush — the comedown. Oh, the comedown! Crashing down into reality when the crush is busy, or unavailable, or unrequited, or simply crushing on someone else. You are distraught! Tragedy strikes, full of ennui, burnt out from the mania of a pseudo-romantic obsession. You lie down, exhausted, coming down from the high of your own fumes.

But… when sunlight hits their face! When you see a smile break across their face unexpectedly! When you keep finding things to find interesting about them! The possibilities are endless. You are drunk on the idea of the future and you are insatiable, wishing and praying and hoping the crush will stick around. Swimming between the currents of attraction, confusion, and embarrassment, a crush is a delicious, potent experience when it isn’t devastating, or maybe especially then.

Adults like to hide their crushes and pretend they’re too grown up for that kind of volatile emotional landscape. Adults enjoy thinking they’re elegant little creatures who feel very moderately after their teens. They are lying. No one feels any less just because they’ve been around on Earth longer. I do think we get better at metabolizing intense feelings — in our teen years, we tend to emotionally or verbally vomit all over ourselves — but all of that crushing hope and devastating devotion remain.

A crush is a force of nature, a mirror, a moment to look into the potential of something and feel inebriated and off-balance in an otherwise meticulously structured Adult World.

Googled "Heartthrobs of the 2000s collage". Was not disappointed.

When a crush ends, it fades imperceptibly — like the transition to feeling wired after a big night out — after a good sleep and a return to normalcy, the comedown is over. Bit by bit, the excitement and the rush of electricity wind down because they have to; because it’s unsustainable, because a tension like that, wound up against yourself, cannot hold.

But how delicious! How exciting! For a few weeks or months — sometimes even as long as a school year! — the crush is a little spark, a fizz, a ball of energy in your stomach, careening inevitably towards burnout. How BLINDING and BRILLIANT it is in the meantime. How entrancing the light is when it’s burning. How brightly it all burns before it’s over — the crush becomes A Person and then the magic wears off, the show must go on, the tape winds down, we are back to mundanity.

And Then. A new crush enters your periphery. There they are! Skin under the sun! And you’re back where you started, a live wire, drunk on potential.