Crushes

i haven't written a Sunday Scribblings in several weeks. I couldn't keep the Chronicles short enough for a blog entry. Being in the middle of a good-bye of sorts made me not want to write about others. Even I can only spill so much emotion all over a blog. Yummy came at too vulnerable a time in the diet for me to tempt myself. Now the subject matter is crushes, just days after I list the loves of my life. I thought I'd be on the bench for this subject as well, but just like the tiramisu I've been craving, it's too tempting to avoid.

I love crushes. They're fun, delightful and innocent. I can't hear the word crush without seeing a pre-teen girl swooning over some singer. I just want to smile wisely, pat the sweet thing on her head and tell her to pull up her socks. I know she just has to go through the horrid longing, the sighing, the delicious what-iffing. "He could see me in a crowd and just know that I am the one and only for him!!!" Movie images come to me now: Michelle Williams' character in the movie Dick taking down her posters of Bobby Sherman (one of my own innocent crushes in the day) and replacing them with news clippings of Richard Nixon, the darker image from Tommy of a young girl caught in the madness surrounding the title character and left scarred for life. When you're young crushes can be terrible, wonderful things.

I've found the mature crush to be a lot more fun, because I've learned that part of what makes a crush fun is that the crushee (or would that be the crushed?) is unobtainable. I can project whatever I want onto Johnny Depp's dark eyes, James Marster's impossible cheekbones, Garrison Keillor's voice, Hugh Laurie's furrowed brow, Clive Owen's crooked nose, the words of a few bloggers (insert wicked grin here) or whoever draws my wide wandering fancy. A crush lets me enjoy the sizzle of carbonating hormones without the angst of youth or the disparity from my projection that reality would inevitably bring. I can enjoy without really wanting. That combination of appreciation tinged with desire balanced by emotional detachment is a potent one. It lets me enjoy me.

That may be what's ultimately so addictive about crushes. It's not really about them, the elusive desired ones. It's about how I feel, how I can still enjoy the quickening of my pulse, the smile that's never revealed to the outside, the thought that would never make it to a blog. A crush is a reminder that I am fully alive.

Sunday Scribblings, crushes