The laws of attraction

All this talk about writer crushes has got me thinking about crushes and attraction in general. I'm ashamed to admit that at 27, I still get crushes. They're the most hopeless thing, this moony schoolgirl (or boy) infatuation. But they're fun, in a way. They allow you to ask yourself what if?

My earliest crushes were on the boys in those magazines, boys whose faces were plastered to my bedroom wall and who would never love me back. I loved them in that silly, adolescent way that only a twelve-year-old girl can. It wasn't until seventh grade that I really began to take notice of the boys around me. Middle-school was a series of short-lived crushes, awkward flirtations, and high school was more of the same. It was a game, that uneasy circling of one another, driven by hormones that were beyond our control. In college, the game changed, but only slightly. The chase was different but that underlying current of thrill remained.

The best part of a crush is always the beginning. When you have a crush on someone, the edges soften and blur, everything slides out of focus. The only thing that's clear to you is this other person, who seems to glow, as if they're lit up from the inside. You feel warmer, lighter when you're around them, your own love reflected back at you, dazzling you with its brightness.

There's this feeling of newness, strangeness; a curiosity, a need to know. Your attention turns to the smallest things: the way they smell, the curve of their collarbone beneath their shirt, the way their hands move when they talk. You wonder what their skin would feel like if it brushed against yours, whether their lips would be soft on your own. What the long line of their back looks like, the muscles working under the skin. You can feel it, the want of them rearranging your DNA, turning every cell to this feeling.

It lasts, for a time, and like everything else, it eventually begins to fade. If the feeling is unreturned, it fades that much faster. It's amazing how quickly the velocity of the heart can change. You look up one day and you see that the world is in focus again, that your crush has become another face in the crowd. Sometimes, you carry a piece of them with you, a small reminder of that brief moment of feeling.

My favorite romantic movies are the ones where one character is secretly in love with the other but it seems impossible that they'll ever end up together. By the end of the movie, you've written them off altogether and then something happens to change the course of the story. It's something small, a look or a touch, an imperceptible shift. An tiny moment but one that changes everything.

This is what I'm waiting for, this moment. And I know that somewhere, someone is waiting to share it with me.