When you’re a kid, crushes are easy to recognize and respond to. Friday afternoon: Will he be at the roller rink tonight? All his friends are going and I just learned to skate backwards.
Did she see me touch the bottom of the deep end after my cannon ball off the high-dive? I hope so, because I forgot to take the Sour Punch Straws outta my pocket before I jumped. Maybe she’ll stop by the Icee Hut after her shift at the car wash.
I don’t know what crushes look like for 25-year-olds. Handing him a mix CD? Going to a party you don’t really care about because she’ll be there? Trying to summon the courage to ask her out during your brief over-the-counter interaction at the restaurant she works at on Wednesdays (between 11 and 7)?
However these things manifest themselves, the feelings that emerge are similar at any age. You don’t see flaws. You get jealous over dumb things. You fill your free time with strategizing about how to be yourself without forcing it and repeatedly making bad jokes OR choking and being the quietest boy/girl in the world. But at the end of the day, you do nothing and you fall asleep, later than you’d hoped for, with unlikely scenarios projected on the inside of your head and a mixture of giddiness and melancholy squeezing your chest. Wake up, repeat.
But maybe it’s best to live in that quagmire of uncertainty because that’s where the butterflies live. Many of us want to walk the path of flirtation into consistency and then into full grown love and dependency one day. But is it such a bad thing to linger in the crush zone a little longer? Isn’t that half the fun?
Art by Mark Ledgerwood and Janet Sung.
Tracks:
- Head Over Heels - Tears for Fears
- Crushin' - Sunny Day in Glasgow
- The Less I Know the Better / Past Life - Tame Impala
- Disco 2000 - Pulp
- Lean Woman Blues - T. Rex
- Walk to The One You Love - Twin Peaks
- The woman that loves you - Japanese Breakfast
- Cutie Boots - Stepdad
- I Have Never Loved Someone - My Brightest Diamond
- Let’s Fall In Love Tonight - Lewis
- Run Away with Me - Carly Rae Jepsen