I've got a crush
I've got a crush
You can’t have a crush without fantasy, and you can’t have fantasy without escape.
Crushes are — and we must admit this — vampiric. “I want to smell you, I want to breathe you in,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos wrote in haunting sexts to his lover Lauren Sanchez. “I love you, alive girl.” Why did he have to specify she was alive? Not, as Twitter proposed, because he is a recovering necrophiliac or because the messages were written by an AI chatbot. There is just something parasitic about how much another person can breathe life into your existence. “Having a crush takes over the everyday,” Tiana Reid writes in The New Inquiry. “A trip to the grocery store like prom, a text message capable of pulverising organs.”
On New Year’s Eve, a friend confessed to a year-long crush on me. “I keep pinching myself,” he whispered between kisses, as fantasy matched up to reality and my life went from black and white to technicolour. Crushes are a blood transfusion, a life-support machine, an elixir of youth. Much like the surreal bodily changes that explode in puberty, crushing can heighten your sense of smell and touch, creating a supernatural zest for life. It’s no wonder that the parts of the brain which bloom on a scan of a person falling in love are similar to someone who’s addicted to drugs. I’m all lit up like a Christmas tree, and I want so badly to ride the high without doing any damage.
Certainly not everyone crushes the same, or at all, but I am someone who falls deeply. Crushing scares me: it’s made me cry on airport floors and in train toilets. I’ve chased people who made me feel splintered and lonely in order to be warmed by their sun. Afterwards it has left me disoriented, embarrassed and hurt. Having a new crush feels a bit like having second thoughts about riding a rollercoaster after I’ve already been strapped in – my guts soar into my chest, preparing to flip like a pancake then drop like a stone.
I’ve lived a whole life with my crush in one afternoon: moved in with them, picked baby names, and delivered a moving eulogy at their funeral, all without their consent. “I can hold a crush longer than most of my friends can hold a grudge,” Hanif Abdurraqib boasts in The Paris Review. I’ve always loved the phrase to nurse a grudge, and I feed my crushes like newborns too, sustaining them on a diet of fantasies and replayed interactions. Just like a grudge, my crushes are stubborn, intense, and although they’re sparked by someone else, the fire is tended by me. “Falling in love can be an isolating act, even if another person is present while it is happening,” Adburraqib laments. “It’s all so interior.”
I switch from believing that if I pair the right words with the right outfit my happiness will be secured, to remembering (with horror) that my crush is an autonomous being, free to ruin all my plans. I think over the ways our relationship could disintegrate and prepare for the worst. “Much of your joy is lost in the need to hold it intact,” Caleb Azumah Nelson writes in Open Water, but I don’t know how to surrender without grasping. I am at my most superstitious when falling in love; all prophecies – from an Instagram sponsored post by a therapist discussing codependent bonds, to a doomy online astrologer – take on a grave meaning.
While my fantasies are upsetting, I know that it is always reality which kills a crush. “She is a dream; I hope I never know her,” Reid writes of one of her crushes. “It is this longing to know her deeply—my untamed dreams and “wasted” energy spent thinking about her—that keeps me here, crushing and being crushed.” It’s tempting to prolong the high by keeping him at an arm’s length, but I don’t want to push away what I want the most. “It is joy to be hidden and disaster not to be found,” pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott wrote about the game hide-and-seek. Crushing is the same: though it can be exciting to hide inside a fantasy, it’s devastating to never be found and embraced.
I can feel when my crushing starts to become bloodsucking, and it's usually when I see my crush as a shortcut to a better life, or when I’m using their rose-tinted gaze to hold up my sense of self. The truth is that you can’t have a crush without fantasy, and you can’t have fantasy without escape. There is always something about myself or my life that I would prefer to flee from, but in order to build a reality that is preferable to having my head in the clouds I have to pay equal attention to what a crush is distracting me from as to what it’s pulling me towards.
And the more I see crushing as a psychodrama, the more comfortable I am with it dwindling. My crush has witnessed unflattering things, like how sharply my moods shift and how insecure I can be about my work. I’ve seen him filled with negativity after a long day and choked with dread when I’ve raised an issue. He no longer feels like an alien in my bed. I wouldn’t say my crushing is entirely gone – I still feel like a balloon around him – but I am glad to slowly drift down to earth, and to be known rather than imagined.
Words by our editor Helen Gonzalez Brown (@helenbr0wn), Photography and videography: Harvey Fairley-Williams (@mr.harvey.wallbanger)
All the products featured in our sexy crushing photoshoot will be available this Saturday at the Stoopid Sexy Market at Anatomie Studio, a shibari educational workshop space in Peckham. All profits from ticket sales go to SWARM, a grassroots sex worker-led collective which advocates for the rights of everyone who sells sexual services — grab one now!
