Crush

The Sunday Scribblings prompt this week is "crush." Ah, crushes. Such wonderful and horrible things. I have story ideas swirling in my head about crushes, but no time to write them. But I can remember crushes I have had.

In Italy, there was a boy named Gennaro. Gaeta was a small town and each evening everyone in it went strolling around, kissing each other's cheeks and eating gelato. And during the day (at least in summer), everyone walked up and down the beach in their bathing suits, similarly kissing cheeks and eating gelato. So when you had a crush in Gaeta, you looked out for him as you walked. I was twelve, and I had a pair of hot pink polka-dotted pants from Benneton that I loved. (And I still think they were awesome, and would probably wear them today.) I had a red bikini from the sprawling tuesday market, and I had a tan such as I will never have again in my life. Gennaro was probably sixteen. He was polite, disinterested. He fell in love with a French girl in a pink bikini that summer, and I would see them walking hand in hand, and splashing each other, and even -- oh, this was hard -- kissing.

In highschool there were various unfulfilled crushes. The big one, hm, I think of him now and I don't see the attraction! Even a few years out of highschool I ran into him -- we went to the same university -- and I wondered: WHY? Why? He had sleepy eyes and a flop of dark dark hair, and there was some indefinable cool about him, but smart-cool. This was Orange County, and I guess surfer-cool was the prevalent cool of the day. That wasn't him. He was bookish. My best friend Lori and I both fell madly in crush with him at Model United Nations conferences. He didn't go to our school and we practically adopted his school and his friends in our madness for him. How ludicrous! When that crush ended, it was like the moment in The Snow Queen when the shard of the enchanted mirror finally falls out of Kay's eye and his spell is broken. It was over, just like that.

There were other crushes, sure, but nothing great until much later, in art school, and that one was very very sweet! There was this guy with long ginger-colored sideburns and really broad shoulders. He parked next to me on the first day of school and then was in my first class, Illustration I, where the teacher assigned us to draw each other! And the next day, he was in my painting class too. He was funny and talented and I married him! In fact, he just walked past wearing plaid flannel pants, putting expensive moisturizer on his face. (Hi sweetie!)