love hurts and crushes suck

thank you for your gift. here's mine.

love hurts and crushes suck, don't they?
this past semester, i learned why a crush is a crush... you walk away in pain. you wish you could be next to that person at all times of the day. you yearn to hear from them. you die a little inside when they walk away. you wait until next time. you hurt when next time doesn't come. you obsess over what you said and what they said. you wish you could take something back--make it sound less corny and more intellectual or witty. do anything in your power to make them feel the same. you feel crushed.

i've had enough crushes. i'm so over them. i went for a power walk/vent time/walking quality time with lindsay probably in the late april time frame and vented forever it seemed. and i finally decided that i never want to have another crush. maybe they're fun for you, but they suck too much out of me. it's like i can't function. if i'm not with them, i want to lay in my bed and think about them. and it's so horrible when you have no idea how they feel about you. it's just painful. so you just lay awake at night thinking up impossible scenarios of them going out on a limb just to love you. i told lindsay that i don't want to have another crush. i just want a friendship and then a smooth transition to a relationship. crushing sucks. i can't do it again. who knows if that will ever actually happen, but i hope i never have to go through it again because it's only fun when they're crushing too. sometimes i literally bow my head and have conversations with my heart. how ridiculous is that? i whisper to my heart and say, "you deserve to be protected and taken care of. you deserve to be appreciated. you deserve to be nurtured. you will not be stomped on. i won't allow it." it's how God sees my heart, and once my heart knows love, it's like it's on a fast track to give every piece of me to somebody else while the rest of me is in a tug-o-war because it never wants to let go of me.

love and lust
love is difficult to interpret. i've never said i love you except to friends and family. i've heard it several times, but i've never said it. i think it's overused. have i felt it? yes. once. i remember it like it was yesterday: we were in his car goofing around, cracking each other up, and listening to justin timberlake and suddenly i just knew. my mind flashed forward to our future and i saw that i could do this everyday for the rest of my life and be the happiest person alive. the weird thing is that i didn't even know that i liked him until that moment and boom it was love. we never dated. i got over it. and then, there's lust. whewwwww. an all-encompassing, completely powerful, physical obsession. just having them whisper your name in your ear can give send shivers down your spine. it's completely mind-blowing. in the months leading into my sophomore year of college and then months afterward, i lusted away. i used to walk around campus with sunglasses on because i could not stop crying. i can only imagine how fun that was for kelsey, katherine, and christa. bahaha. the feeling is akin to breaking apart your skin because you've never felt so unified, or like you fit so perfectly with anyone else. but it is soooo unhealthy. obsessive even. and i think it takes more time to get over that kind of a relationship than a healthy one.

it's so good, but it's also all a crap shoot. we all go through it and we all ache. i wish there was advil for it. one thing i do know, i'll take my heart over somebody who is so detached any day of the week. maybe their bounce-back time is faster, but at least i know the depth of my love and just how good it can feel.

...i realized just now that i would never make a good journalist, only a kick-ass op-ed columnist.