If someone was ever to ask us what is that one thing more overwhelming than falling in love I am sure we would unanimously agree upon one thing…‘crushing’. Really this cute little feeling that I have had the good fortune of experiencing for a long time now, always made me personify it as a sixteen year old girl who, for the first time in her life lays her eyes on someone beyond herself, upon that unknown youth at the bus stop or auto stand that makes her world go wheeee!!! yet it has a strictly drawn boundary around it, a threshold which might never be crossed not because it is forbidden but our conscience tells us, it’s just better this way. Because our crush, this innate little feeling inside us which keeps us awake late at night, makes us listen to all our favourite love songs over and over again and makes us yearn for one glance of that person during the day, we somehow don’t want to murk it with pragmatism or maybe, with reality. This experience is so common to all of us that we will literally, feel exactly what the second person has gone through when he or she crushed over someone. I remember about myself, as a twelve year old my first crush was one of the cool kids of my class, well I was wrong to have that you know, because you don’t grow feelings for the cool guy when you are that oily and braided haired girl who follows the school rule book to the core with her skirt length exactly the measure mentioned in her book. I strayed into that out of bounds section of life where insignificant people like me should never stray, not even in their wildest dreams. It doesn’t require explaining that it didn’t turn out well and ended with me leaving my old school a year later. In my new school I had the most amazing experience. I saw couples walking hand in hand side by side during break times. Although they called themselves to be in “relationship” I am quite sure it was never more than what a crush initiates in our hearts, that fluttering butterflies in our stomachs, those sweet nothings that sounded more profound than Shakespeare! We weren’t naïve, I should say we still knew how to protect ourselves from the pangs of reality and the obvious, something which we lost with age.
The mark of a true crush is that you fall in love first and grope for reasons afterward.
Crushes are important in life. They help us to live in a way that doesn’t require any external push or assurance to tell us that we are fine. It has the natural ability to generate in us a positive outlook about everything, love, relationships, society anything! We learn new things from it like valuing small gestures or insignificant acts which would otherwise be meaningless to us. Once I had the good fortune of riding on my crushes bike!! Can you believe that!! It was picture perfect for me, getting up and sitting behind him, my hands lightly resting on his shoulders and the wind that kept blowing my hair over my face! I smelled an aroma in the air that day which I had never smelled before. that little incident made me believe that fairytale lies in our heart and we can experience magic in our regular mundane lives if, we just let the magic wand perform its own chores! Not for once I expected him to exchange nos or ask me to meet up again later, he was merely helping me to do something which was really important to me and that did the magic! I was happy to find myself overcome my carnal instincts, I believed in the moment for a change without expecting anything and I felt free. That is exactly what a crush does, help us get rid of our inner constraints without making us aware of it.
Adults say the crush infatuation etc are very childish things, happen only to young people. I disagree with this. What happens to us as we grow old is we become afraid, afraid of losing ourselves. But we are human beings , we were meant to lose control weren’t we?? What else then would make two sixty year old male and female develop an undefined connection between each other just by talking in a park for some days that one of the pair knows the reason of absence of the other even though no one has mentioned it. The day my father retired, I remember, he absent mindedly uttered a line out of the blue “wish I could say her bye”. I felt warm on hearing this, a kind of fullness that makes you proud about yourself that you aren’t going in the wrong direction.
These little “things” that happen to us they are life permanently engraved memories in our minds. We don’t really want to do away with them, we cherish them and we feel good that they happened because somehow without our knowledge we changed our being in that moment and we ended up liking ourselves a little more.