“I’ve had hints of that heart-stopping feeling…” I trailed off, searching for the right words. “But I’ve never felt it to quite the same level, with the same intensity, like I did with Ryan. If I saw him in the halls, my heart would start pounding and wouldn’t stop for the rest of the day.”
While explaining the force of my great middle school love-ache to my sister, I realized it’s quite possible I haven’t felt a deep, chest-piercing crush since then. Even when I had my first kiss, I was certainly interested in the guy I’d spent time with for months, and I felt those flutters of excitement, but never did I feel the arrows of deep attachment. Back in eighth grade, when I fell in love with Ryan Griffin, it was a full biopsychological theater act.
There was something awing in how much I cared about the fact that I cared about him, how much I reveled in my crush. Others played violin, but he played violin for hours each day, and I was clearly a step above the rest in recognizing the dreaminess of his passion, and it made the situation more special. He wrote short stories like I did, delightful. He blushed when he laughed, irreplaceable. We were both teachers’ pets, so we communicated almost entirely over Google Docs comments. Every time I saw a notice in my email, I would grin like a maniac. I collected Ryan like one would organize a coin collection. The one night he and I walked back to my house from the creek, I couldn’t breathe.
The one person I met in college who I thought was my soulmate, who gave me nearly the same joy and anxiety as Ryan had, utterly shattered my heart — and consequently my naivete. Oddly enough, though, I had my week or two of deep sobbing, and then I moved on. If the pain or the hope rose, I would engage in negative retrospection, flashing images in my mind of all the things that made him a poor choice. My next relationship after that, his intense interest in me led me to pretend to myself I was interested back. Unfortunately, he was probably the truest friend out of all my love interests. Things got messy. I had to make a clean cut. To this day, it is still one of my deepest regrets.
You might tell me, “You haven’t really fallen in love yet.” You might be right. Still, I can’t be alone in believing age has worn me beyond the magic of uninhibited affection. Is it better that we lose such irrational attachment as adults? Or does it hint at a learned distrust of vulnerability?
I think, paradoxically, there was something less potent about the Ryan situation. Shy as we both were, we didn’t move things forward even after months of closeness. In that, deep down, I never actually believed things would go anywhere, I felt a sense of freedom in my dreamworld of Ryan Griffin. He would always be fantasy. Chest-crushing fantasy.
Is it ridiculous to want that middle school crush back?
Thankfully, deep friendship has taken the place of romantic intimacy. I love more quickly, more deeply, than I ever thought I’d be able to love people that aren’t family. Still, I’d like to feel something at least a little like what I felt back then. To have one’s consciousness hijacked by another being is nothing short of stunning.