CRUSH

thinking about crushes. Crushes are wonderful yet horrible things. You like someone so
much that it brightens your day to see them but it ruins it if they happen to ignore you. My
last real crush was on a boy at school named REY.* He was cute, smart, and of course
he made me laugh: in short, he was a classic triple threat to any girl in the 8th grade. Back
in the day I thought the crush was mutual. At the time school was coming to an end and
it seemed like everyone was confessing their undying love to someone. One night we
were chatting on AIM (the text message of the early 2000s) about our homework and it
finally came out: he told me he had a really big crush…on my best friend.

That night I remember moping around the house, crying like a little girl who lost her
puppy. I’m a firm believer that the reason they call them ‘crushes’ is because someone
usually gets crushed. I had been crushed. REY was probably my last real ‘crush’ because
when I got to high school, I started to date more and found that guys were more willing to
make the first move. The concept of dating (hopefully) matures as you mature so luckily
there’s less crushing as you get older. Besides, the inevitable celebrity crush which we
all know never ends well.

Years later when I was about seventeen, I ran into REY at my pool where he was
lifeguarding. We caught up and began to reminisce about our middle school days. At the
end of the conversation, he asked me out. I said no because I had a boyfriend, but I’ll
never forget his response. He laughed and said, “Okay, I understand. It’s a shame; I had
such a crush on you in middle school.” He turned and walked away leaving me with my
jaw dropped.

Now the point of all that is not to say that crushes always come full circle or that if you
wait long enough you’ll get the response you always wanted. I definitely don’t recommend
hanging around your pool every summer hoping to run into your former crush. The point
is a crush is an exciting thing that often leads to nothing because most of the time people
are too afraid to admit to them. Crushes are fun for a moment, then maybe a tiny bit
heartbreaking, but they eventually go away.