I was walking down the hall after taking my trash to the closet bin for our floor and this unexpected memory popped into my head for no reason whatsover..."Jenny" from a temp place I worked in the early 90s...I had the biggest crush on her...she looked like Kyra Sedgwick (though I didn't know that back then) and was so funny and nice and had a wonderful laugh and big teeth...she had a boyfriend named M.(who looked like a football player and had a goofy, but sweet grin) so I knew my crush was perfectly safe and non-productive, but I still felt guilty.
One day I was covering for her at the reception desk while she took her lunch break...I was manning the phones and it was quiet and I was taping my pencil to the beat of a song I was hearing only in my head. All of sudden the headset lifted off of my ears and I heard her wonderful laugh and she said, "I don't hear any music. What ARE you listening to?" She smiled at me and I knew (knew, obviously!) that it was completely platonic and benevolent and somewhat absent-minded...she was so happy that summer because they were getting engaged...but my heart (I remember this SO clearly now!) did all these amazing flip flops and I just about melted and I just know there was this huge silly look on my face...gosh, I had completely forgotten about that moment until just now...about her in general, even though she was definitely the brightest spot of an otherwise horrendous summer ('91)...that one moment is probably one of the clearest, most unique memories in what is one of the weirdest catalogues of crush memories ever...in an odd way, happier and brighter than any of my other memories...how odd...wonder if that will flash before my eyes when i die...how odd that i remember that now...
...somehow that crush always gets lost in the shuffle when I think back on my big crushes...even "A" gets lost (two years later after that!) and we actually went out on a "date" to the symphony...it was an unintentional one and i think she realized when we bumped heads that night and looked at me funny and completely freaked...she was never the same to me after that night...of course buying her flowers when it was her birthday that time probably didn't help either...what a geek i am when i'm crushing...still neither of those were as bad as my fiasco in high school...the only time i ever went so overboard as to never be capable of being forgiven...
"Crush"...it sounds like such an innocent word and most of the time it is...but sometimes it takes on the weight of what it sounds like the more you repeat the word..."crush"...as in, "crushed" under a grand piano or a giant boulder.
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