I Will Not Quote Tay Tay

“You look like a female David Spade.”

This was said to me—to my face—by a member of the opposite sex who was five years my junior. It was bad enough to have a photo of myself critiqued so harshly (the comment came unsolicited to boot). BUT:

I was fourteen. And my Crush was there and heard it. And he laughed loudly, long, and hard.

Everyone has a Crush that’s the capital-“C” Crush: the big one. The one that got away … and kept getting away for years on end. The one on whom you kept tabs even when also crushing on other people. The one about whom you knew everything: best friends, pets’ names, favorite bands, part-time jobs, cars both actual and dream, siblings. The one you could always sense walk into the space you occupied no matter how vast that space was at the time. The one whose only flaw was, your friends helpfully pointed out, not wanting to go out with you—but somehow even this could be excused. The one about whom all sad songs you liked were clearly written. The one to whom you gave an exceedingly mortifying nickname so that you could decorate your notebook with “I ♥ ‘the initials of said exceedingly mortifying nickname’” and then coyly refuse to identify but revel in the attention garnered by classmates’ incorrect guessing.

The one with whom you eventually became really, truly, close friends. The one to whom you quite solemnly apologized over Mexican one night for how embarrassed and annoyed—nay, how miserable—your unrequited love must have made him for all those years (seven or eight).

The one you of course got over but somehow didn’t in some way, because here you are 22 years later still thinking about how unbearably humiliating it felt to be mocked in front of him.