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I remember His denim swathed hips, rocking suggestively. He, my first “he” who ever merited a mental capital H, a mullet-crowned god keening his helpless plea to the concert crowds: “Don’t tear my heart, my achey…breakey….heart….” I was 8 years old and I knew, with a pang as irrevocable and sudden as catching one’s finger in a door that a cataclysmic shift had occurred in my tiny world.
How can I describe the feeling of a first crush? Well, at first I didn’t know what it was. The only thing I could compare it to was feeling sick. Something was there— a sweetly unpleasant feeling that had not been there before— and it couldn’t be wished away. Honestly, the dilemma of whether I am feeling sick or just feeling feelings has always been an issue. But, for the sake of this writing, I’ll try to be honest about the feeling of crushing... or is it a feeling about being crushed? Was I actually sick? Or was I just scared for a boy to sit next to me on the bus that morning? I still can feel the nausea rise and smell the vinyl seats, warm and slightly sticky in the late-spring sun as my mom prodded me onto the waiting school bus. Sick or not, I was going to school. I stared fixedly, fervently, out the window praying to god (who I sometimes talked to when I wanted something), that today no boys would try to talk to me, sit near me, touch my hair, look at me. I recently had learned from my Grandma Eve the somewhat terrifying fact that god could hear you if you proposed a bargain, and that he specifically delighted in his subjects punishing themselves in small ways for his good favor. Grandma, locked in the vice grip of God’s gnashing teeth, doomed to only ever eat hot dogs on Saturdays for the rest of her epically long-suffering life because of the various deals she had made with this invisible man over the years. “Dear god,” I pleaded, “please don’t let Christopher K. sit next to me today. I won’t wear my favorite dress all week.” Anyway, back to crushes. Mr. Achy Breakey, Billy Ray. At 8, I knew steadfastly that: A. I didn’t like the song. B. I didn’t like or want the feeling it gave me, and C. that because I wasn’t a Republican (according to my dad), the crush felt confusing on a political level. Despite all of this wrongness, the feeling persisted, a cross between hot and dizzy—somewhere anatomically below your stomach. I am thinking a lot tonight about the similarities between this first ACTUAL crush on a real live person and a crush i’ve experience more lately. Although they are separated by nearly 30 years, the passage of time and all of the things I have presumably learned aren’t really making much of a difference. It is a sick, haunted feeling and I don’t like it. I can’t even type her actual name, that’s how utterly paralyzed I am by the thought of her. So Charlie will have to do. To try and paint a picture of the real, actual, living and breathing Charlie, no words, however lovely, could ever stand a chance of succeeding. The thought of her makes me so disgustingly stupid. Even as I’m typing this, pausing and worrying and chewing my cuticle– oh god, what if by the act of writing this, of just making the words appear in the world— what if somehow she knows?? Because she can’t. Ever. Know. This is the twisted rule I impose upon myself about crushes. I’ll try to start with what I can see and then we’ll go from there. God, the singular deliciousness of even allowing myself to think of her in this level of detail. Imagine you’re in a room with a hundred people milling around, a hundred fascinating, unique people— and it’s not too hard to find something interesting to look at when surrounded by people. All the colors, sweater textures, eyebrows, ugly shoes, who’s touching who, who’s laughing now, etc. A buffet of details to spin your eyes in their sockets. But then, you see her and it really is just like a movie: A golden spotlight clicks on and illuminates only her. But the light is somehow coming FROM her. No one else is in the room. Just Charlie. Her eyes are huge and clear and light gray and they do this thing that chops you off at your knees, a languorous, luxurious blink. I make eye contact with her and the entire world loses balance, just for a moment— because I can’t take more than a moment holding her gaze before I look down or away or anywhere else in a blind panic. But if I could look, this is what I’d notice. Her lips, curved in a wicked little smile. I know they’re velvet and perfect because I’ve touched them with my lips (more on that later, maybe). Her talons, always polished and honed to razor points. Painted a spooky palette, even in the dead heat of summer. A ring she wears, black onyx in a setting of silver bones, a birthday present from her Daddy. Her pale skin, etched with ink in secret and not secret places. The improbable wild curve of her, a curve only nature could imagine and make real, like the perfect C of a cat curled contentedly, dreaming an unknowable dream. Her warm cheeks, her neck, her voice. Other parts I can’t type without a paralyzing blush. I’ve never had this happen to me, a crush that I can’t hide or run away from. Charlie is my friend. She’s friends with my friends. I see her all the time. We do normal things…but not, like, alone together— that would be crazy. I’m totally, mostly normal around her when there are other people present. I can wrangle the crush into a vice grip, hold it down while conversing like an almost-normal person, about some gossip or the weather, or whatever the fuck. Then sometimes, suddenly, jealousy erupts in acid blooms of vivid color. Like recently when she texted me in all caps excitement, “you’ll never guess what.” The news is, she’s dating a mutual acquaintance— Let’s call them Scout. And I am rabidly, astonishingly jealous about this. The jealousy is so complicated and granular, I’m sure I’d get exhausted trying to parse the separate grains into neat shitty little piles. As far as I can figure, my jealousy focuses on two people: Scout, and some parallel universe version of Me. About Scout— I’m jealous of their action-taking, wherewithal, ability to want something and ask for it. Their knowing-of-what-they-want. Their surety of themselves, their seeming confidence that they are a Person who Deserves Things, a person who is always the main character of their own story. A person drawn in unbroken lines. A person who is worthy of being seen, noticed. It seems to me that another version of myself exists, a version who can hold and return Frankie’s gaze, perhaps long enough for something to switch over— a liminal possibility that hinges upon the length of our eye contact. If I could just push myself over that line, become that other person. …
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