On Crushes

Crushes are weird.

Everything starts from that flick-of-a-switch moment where you suddenly see them being something more in your life. Maybe as something that could be. And maybe that’s how all meaningful relationships begin — not with bold declarations about who they are, but rather a quiet unfolding of the chapters that made them who they are. You know them as more than what you had perceived: their pains, maybe even some of their not-so-endearing qualities. But that only seems to make you like them more.

Maybe it’s like owning an old car; you know all of its quirks and beauties, and you still choose to keep it — even after the stupid Chevy Chevelle gives a horrendous fuel economy of 2 kilometers per litre.

And maybe the worst part about having a crush is that this particular someone refuses to leave your mind. What makes matters even worse is the fear that you are not to them what they are to you.

You think about preserving the friendship — or whatever fragile something that exists between you — for weeks, but moments of insomnia, induced by what people refer to as “being too much in your head,” may make you want to end this suffering for yourself. And in your suffering, you, weirdly enough, hope that they too are suffering — from something that neither of you thought necessary to express.

Eventually, you make up your mind — that today will be the unholy, godforsaken day you tell them everything. Because to let them believe you are who they hoped for, when you know you’re not, feels like a quiet betrayal.

You prepare for the worst: to stop texting them when you see a hilarious signboard, or when you see an interesting movie, or when you just want to share the drama from work. And maybe even stop seeing them, should they take your honesty rather badly.

You may wonder how you can stop talking to them randomly one day, after having felt so close to someone. But in all your misery, you find it impossible to expect something positive from the truth you are about to spring upon them.

You may even find it easier to just take a “no” rather than a very scary “yes,” or an awkward, ambiguous silence.

And in this chaos your mind is in, you may even wonder whether it’s them you really liked, or an idea of such a person — someone who simply just gets everything you do without grand gestures or actual words. You quietly hope it’s them, because who in their right mind has a crush on an idea?

And in the moment before all your apprehensions and excitements cease to exist through the act of confession, you think about whether it was a crush after all — or just love you were too stubborn to accept.

But you decide to settle and call it a crush — because love lost is rather hard to live with. Because the truth — that someone whose path often used to meet yours now walks a different one, without the hindrance of your love — is often a tough pill to swallow. Because knowing that someone you have loved — to the truest extent of the word — has never and will never feel the same is something that gnaws at your very existence.

And somehow you’ve already prepared an answer for your close ones who may ask you about them years later:

“It was only a crush, after all.”