Crushing

A crush is an amazing thing. A crush can make a work day more productive, turn a trip to the Post Office into an erotic adventure, and transform a tedious college class into a thrilling joyride. Crushing is the most fun a girl can have with her clothes on, hands down. Well, almost.

Having a crush is like having an imaginary boyfriend... and because he's imaginary, he can be anything I want. Let's face it: having a crush is exciting. It's passionate. It's bittersweet. It's a mysterious secret. It's all the things that I miss in my everyday rush-around life. Crushing is clean, healthy, silly-human-tricks fun.

Aye, the rub: Not sure how it happened, but what started as a bona-fide, worthy-of-a-teenager crush suddenly came out of the closet and announced itself as full-blown and undeniable desire. And hot on its heels came an inner conflict the likes of which I've never felt before.

The thing about a crush is that the object of crushing (that's a technical term) is untouchable. That's why they're crushes and not lovers. A crush is purely selfish: a way to possess something that otherwise, by his very nature, could not be possessed. Crushing, by definition, is completely one-sided. It is a one-dimensional relationship that requires no effort to maintain and no emotional investment to gum up the works. It's easily conjured and just as easily banished. Once a crush has served its purpose, it usually fades just as quickly as it materialized.

My once-innocent crush has morphed into something almost unrecognizable and wholly alien to me. No longer the selfish and one-sided fantasy, it has pronounced its intent to take up what might be permanent residence in my psyche. Yes, it remains passionate and exciting and bittersweet and mysterious... but emerging from the crush's silken chrysalis is a new and powerful need which appears to manifest as a singular unwillingness to allow the crushing untouchability (also a technical term) to remain the status quo. Desire is the new name of the game... and it speaks its truth in a low and thready pulse, demanding attention and action and - God help me - reciprocity.

I know that this new and troubling sensation is not just a crush escalation (soon I'll need a Glossary) because my crush is no longer just a reason to get up and go to work. It's no longer a steamy mastubatory fantasy. It's a tangible, real desire that owes very little of its passion to the sexual and is driven by more than the force of I want. Oh, make no mistake... the sexual side is there, and it bites and snarls and claws at me; I want to touch and taste, to shriek and cry, to breathe his scent while his sweat drips onto my face and his essence fills me. I want to pour the electric blue light of my untethered soul into his blood and set him free.

But... so much more than that... I want to ease his pain, soothe his spirit, and calm his mind. I want to lay my hands on his skin and slide the nervousness, the tension, the sheer weight of the life he's chosen out of his body and away from his consciousness. I want to be a confidante, a trusted compatriot, a rock in the rushing whitewater river of his daily living. I want to be able to stand both inside and outside of his life, the twilight and predawn of all his days.

But all of that could still be a crush, right? Silly musings from some preadolescent daydream?

The difference: I want him to want me to. And he won't. So I can't. And while I mourn the lost simplicity of the crush that was, I'll revel, too, in the knowledge that even at this late stage of the life-game...
I can feel something totally new.