crush

One day I will develop a crush on someone who is capable of having a crush on me in return. This all achieved from within the safe strength of my marriage. "I love my husband," I will tell him or her and he or she will nod sadly and say, "I know. How sad it is that we did not meet and part twenty years ago." We will sigh and perhaps hug and inhale the glorious otherness of a separate human being. When we glimpse each other there will be a quiet smile. I know that I am attracted to him or to her and she or he is attracted to me in return. Together we understand that this attraction will be taken no further, but it is comforting to know that it is a shared thing.

The thing about a marriage is that it is never enough. No matter how good and strong and infused with lust and familial surety, there is the drone of day to day living no matter how hard we try to see each other as independent individuals. He becomes something of mine. I become a part of him. Sometimes we barely like each other but there is a history of fighting and returning to each others arms. Sometimes we return to each others arms out of habit.

He says that I am beautiful but it is not me that he is seeing. He is seeing a multitude of selves, me as a wild young cat pacing in the cage of our life together, me as the sad and troubled creature wrestling with her demons. Me as the exhausted slug who can not raise herself to any kind of passion for home renovations. He is talking about the beauty that is inherent in any story if you follow it closely enough. I am not beautiful for myself alone, I am a part of a continuing narrative that he is committed to seeing through to it's conclusion.

When I shake myself free of the current obsession I will find someone who actually looks at me and notices the things that are beautiful for this moment alone. Someone who reads my work. This is the most important thing. Someone who falls in love with my voice first and then who sees me and finds the rest of me irresistible, all that balled up energy, the squat and sassy flesh, the sharp eyes and whip of a tongue.

I am tired of putting so much of myself into people who are unmoved by me. I am tired of seeing myself reflected in their eyes, old and cynical and unlovely. I am just plain tired of setting myself up for the same fall again and again. There are lovely things about me. There are things that one might lust after. I am loyal and I am sensual and I am sick of hurling myself against closed doors.

I am happy in my marriage. You could never be as beloved as my husband. You could never be as beautiful to me. But you are turning down this little sliver of possibility, a quiet mutual attraction that goes nowhere, like a little glow in the bottom of a lovely sculpted fireplace, a place to huddle affectionately with no risk of the flame flaring into a greater passion.

Next time, when I haul myself up and out of this impoverished crush, I will fall for someone who can love me in return, a chaste and firm mutual admiration. When this happens I will know that I have made peace with myself.