Of Crushes and Heartaches

I was reflecting on a price of writing I had just analyzed, it had a particular question that irked me, triggered a memory that was not so comfortable. When I was young, I never had any crushes like all the girls, I grew up a perfect tomboy and I was just not interested in any of the boys that claimed that I was the love of their lives.

As I grew older, I thought I was slightly abnormal that my hormones did not trigger off any heart melting feelings or mush, but I thought it was cool and most of the girls seemed silly anyway, so I appeared cold hearted and I like it that way.
By the time I was in college, I thought I was asexual, without any sexual preferences. This was probably to do with the way I was brought up and the fact that I spent all the time I had with boys, biking, climbing trees, looking at fast cars, listening to the boys talking about their lovelorn lives. This could also have been a result of some history I had which did not gel well with my composure and self-image. So, I just let it be.

However, to say that I never had a crush would be slander. I did have them, but until a lot later, I never realized it was a crush. A crush or a soft corner in the folds of my heart that seemed wrapped in cold, scaly rough folds. Boys look at everything differently and in retrospect, I never really understood the way I felt because I was stuck. I was a growing girl growing up with boys all around me and I never had a proper girlfriend to talk to until I was eighteen.

I then met Literature, I learnt the difference, and I understood the nuances, ever so slight of love and fluttering eyelashes and heartbeats. I fell in love with the books, the romance and drama of Shakespeare, the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Post Modernist Poetry, Neruda, TS Eliot, Robert Frost, Donne, Metarealism of Russian poets, Milan Kundera, Khalil Gibran, O Henry, Amrita Pritam, Kamala Das, EM Foster, Hemmingway, Cronin… The list was endless and the library brimming as I sifted through the shelves of literature discovering the fairy tale heroes and devouring their stories.

I was spinning out of control in worlds that the books created for me and I was falling in love with the characters and my professors who taught me to enjoy my Macbeth and the three witches as much as I reflected on lesbian writing. I finally understood and reflected on my past. Here is what I discovered.

“Someday you'll find a man, a good man, and you'll love him, and marry him, and live and die for him. And I'll be hanged if I stand by and watch.”

I was eleven when I first read little women and I was in love with Laurie from the time he met Jo, I was Jo, I lived every word of the book and I was heartbroken when Jo refused him and sent him away so cruelly, he was the first to have captured so much of my attention.

Little did I know the lack of interest in real men stemmed from this, the fact that I had every single kind of man I wanted and needed I had with me, and the fact that they were unreal never seemed to bother me. That probably explains the lack of crushes. Even now, Hugh Jackman and a few others just manage to capture an ounce of my attention, but it stops there yet again. My crushes live in the pages I read. They are more alive and real than the real ones.

“Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

That was Rhett Butler, one of the most impacting characters in my life, he came alive from the pages of Gone with the Wind and captured my heart when I was just thirteen.

Falling head over heels in love then was easy when it was a fictitious hero and that’s exactly what I did, fell like nine pins for him and his extremely magnetic personality, a maverick with courage strength and what not. The book just made my life so different. As I think of what this book did to me, I get Goosebumps. But all this was a long time ago.

Now, I am so madly in love and this time its for real, its not a fairy tale hero or a character from a book. I know what love is because today it goes beyond everything I ever felt. I am marrying the one man I actually in reality fell for, a real blood and flesh man, who is the best thing to have ever happened and the romance in my life is so much more enriching than any classic, drama or epic. He is all the Laurie’s and Rhett Butlers of the world rolled into one, beyond my understanding of love as it is.