Always in love

Or was it something else I felt over and over again?


I can’t remember a time when I was’t head over heels in love with someone. My first crush was on Star Trek’s Mr. Spock at the tender age of seven, and even then I was driven to inadvisable acts in the name of love. One day I scrawled “I love spock!” in bloodred crayon on the wall of my playroom and was soundly spanked for my efforts. In standard 4, I loved Sammy. I loved him because he swore and played the trumpet (in that order), and also because he was olderand all these qualities made him a perfect allround bad boy. When I discovered that his real name wasn’t Sammy, I teased him night and day, even though he usually beat the pulp out of anyone who dared call him by his real name, to his face. The fact that he never pounded me, I took as a sign of his pure, undying love.
I’ve had so many crushes it’s difficult to keep track. from third rate hockey players to dead opera stars to all the members of a band (at the same time), I’ve lusted for them. My crushes have ranged from faint interest to pure gibbering insanity.
Crushes can derail your life. Like some sort of emotional typhus, there is the initial contact with the infectious agent, a period of fertering and fevered delirium, followed by a long period of recovery.
Even science is of little ues in combating the craziness. We humans are biologically engineered to be addicted to love. The “crush” is actually a cocktail of hormones triggered by something as simple as a glance. One minute you’re calmly walking down the street, the next moment you’re dumb struck by the unearthly beauty of the guy stacking bottles at the supermarket. You don’t get to pick. In perfect inverse proportion – the stupider you get, the better it seems.
Here’s the final twist: Just when you feel you understand the forces at work, sopmething comes along to wreck all your theories.
Which leads me to the last and perhaps biggest crush of my life. I would walk by his house twice a day every day, even though it was more than a kilometerb out of my way. Heading up his street, I’d grow faint and my heart would pound, all from sheer possibility of actually seeing him
I was giddy, I was gaga, I was completely out of my mind. I drove my whole family insane with endless recitations of “he likes me”, “he likes me not”, “do you think he loves me?”. If you think this is juvenile, you’re right, but that’s what crushes do: they reduce us to total imbeciles.
And what happened to the last big crush, you ask?
Hehe…