Between you and me, as a 20 something year-old, crushes are beginning to feel less and less like a fairytale and more like a horror film.  Stories of young love, once coated in a filtered vibrance, now have the sour taste of adulthood—akin to a haunting lament.  

Truly, we are such different people from those that lived out sunny days as free adolescents. Where a crush was always at the top of our priority list; days where we walked the halls on a specific route just to see them. Where the entire lunch table was LIVID hearing us exclaim how we FINALLY made eye-contact. 

And while many years have passed since then, it is now, during the height of the fall semester of mid-October, that I am beginning to feel that sweet, shivering chill.  

Life has become increasingly inconsistent. What is a crush going to do? Where does that fall into the mix and messiness of our lives?  Are we too old to daydream, to disassociate mid lecture at the thought of someone? I mean come on, we are getting degrees out here, landing internships, signing up for credit cards (that we will soon regret). 

How comedic it is, to be standing in line at the grocery store or, the DMV—simply thinking of a prolonged smile, unbroken eye-contact, the redness of their ears when… 

SNAP OUT OF IT. 

4:58 a.m.

It feels like someone summoned me. Awakened by a cold sweat, too early to be awake, too late to go back to sleep—

I have a lecture at 9.

Lying in bed, hazy and groggy: is this a dream or real life? I looked down only to find out my stomach was inside out.  There are no more bad monsters under my bed, rather a skeleton in my closet, peeking at me from afar; he’s the one that woke me up. It is terrifying, yet; I want to see more of it.  

Everyone does. 

But truly…what is a crush but a lack of information? The strange in-between: what you want to know vs what is true. Even to our own demise, we just want to find out more. The good, the bad—who is the person under the mask? 

Apparently, crushes are defined as “an intense and usually passing infatuation.” A crush is like a jump scare, straight out of a thriller; as quickly as it comes, it goes. Gone and onto the next. 

So, why do we hyper fixate? Why are we out here drooling over this stranger? Why does our heart skip a beat every time we run into them—as if your heart could fall out of your chest; would they really catch it? I see crushes like spikes in our leveled-out lives. When they are active, it’s a loud, piercing sensation—makes faces melt and heat infests our nervous system, like a possession. 

When we were younger, a crush easily intersected into a form of identity. Now, we know this infatuation will NOT last forever. Something about that is comforting: death and rebirth, a never-ending cycle. 

Allow yourself to be both ambitious and tongue-tied. Is that not what being in your 20s is all about? 

At this point we know; they come and go. As we move on, it’s not the dead ones we should be worried about, but the ones who were buried alive. They are like a pop-up book from hell; they live in the lifted corners of the files that are labeled: unsolved. Cold, bloody murder: the inevitable death of what could’ve been. That is what we are here for, the feeling of excitement and fear all at once, the thrill of it all.