They happen in the privacy of our minds, pretty much everywhere.
At the pool, the conference, the aisles of a supermarket.
The dynamic is always the same. Very little knowledge, indeed complete ignorance combined
with a deep sense of knowing them absolutely and of being entirely certain they would if
only circumstances allowed, be the one. It's been going on since early adolescence
at least, this madness. And even now when someone should know better,
it happens. These crushes, they show off our capacity
for knowing how to make the most of the smallest details.
A wrist, a neck, an ankle, a pair of jeans worn a certain way.
They instantly become whole people with whom we can imagine years of a life together, full
of profound mutual sympathy, tenderness and laughter.
This blessed person will, we know, understand us
and all the secret complex, ignored parts of us.
This capacity we have for elaborating a whole personality from a few small details, it's
there when we look at sketches. This isn't someone who has no nostrils, eight
strands of hair and no eye lashes. It's a beautiful creature we feel we understand
at once. The cynics say, it's madness, this filling
in of the gaps. We're just projecting wild wreckless fantasies...
but that's too sweeping. We're probably right to be delighted. It's
just not the whole story. Perhaps that remarkably thin wrist with the
leather band around it really does belong to someone who is skeptical, alternative,
delicate, intelligent, wry. The error of the crush is to go beyond that
insight, to think this could ever be the whole truth about a human being.
Knocked off course by the crushes power, we forget one central inviolable fact of human
nature. That everyone is crazy and trouble to be around.
Everyone has something substantially wrong with them.
Everyone is extremely hard to live with. You can't know what, from an ankle or a wrist
but it'll be something. Time will reveal it sure enough...
because life has messed all of us up, because we all grew up inadequately parented
and have all ended up terrified and anxious pretty much the whole time.
That said, we shouldn't give up on having crushes at any age.
We just shouldn't believe in what they appear to promise anymore.
Of we haven't glimpsed complete perfection. It's just a pretty nice side or two
coming to the fore.