Composition of a crush

Moving slowly through the yearning

Glyphs from Nancy Stark Smith’s The Underscore

It has been five years since I felt the telescoping awareness of a new gay crush. In the compulsory heterosexuality of the rural north I have been faced with dating options that don’t fit the essence of my sexuality, which I find to be inherently homosexual. While I am able to date cis men and have sex with them with some amount of pleasure, I am always left feeling an emptiness and lack of connection.

To be queer and date someone who identifies as straight is an uncomfortable and strange phenomenon. But the glimmer of a boy’s hair strewn on top of his head with a hair clip after he is finished laying stones for the day is a cruel curse of desire. And yet, I look for someone to match my freak and dare I say it is a different kind of passion, pursuit, and practice.

It can be hard to define what it means to be gay, especially when you’re non binary. Finding a way to talk about who we can fall in love with and how we do it can feel clunky, like there isn’t a right way to define it.

All I know is that when I kissed a girl I have a crush on last week my whole body said - this, this is what we like. This is what we do. One sweeping kiss in a duet catapulted me in a way that no kiss with a man ever has. Like a shooting star the sparkle can burn fast and fly and die, but to see it and to know it is to be it. Perhaps there is another way, to tend to desire without urgency, without waiting, without haste.

The composition of a crush takes many stages. There is sometimes even years of a prelude that we don’t know we will come back to. A note of appreciation, mail returned to sender, a psychic tethering. A prelude we didn’t even know we were in. The silence before the first entrance, the bated breath of curiosity, the small movement of the hand that dares to enter but isn’t sure if it is the right time. And suddenly, they are in front of you. There all along, meandering through dreamscapes, we meet in the rain.

I’ll start by saying I feel alive again. Like the most important part of me was missing, and now I am myself again.

I feel hotter. I remembered I could wear button up shirts fastened all the way to the top. Hilary taught me this, so did the crush, so did my first girlfriend. The feelings of spaciousness and the feeling I felt when I first realized I was gay in a feelings matching physicality way flooded to the surface and left me with a bounty of utopic bliss. Today I feel this again.

This sensation often tricks us into thinking it is about the crush as a person and not the fact that we simply like how we feel. We may think if we are so happy and alive again it must be because of them. It is my belief that it is not. It is because of what reawakens within us.

We risk rushing toward the next compositional choice and the rush brings adrenaline and the adrenaline is a drug so I ground into reminding myself that this is not love burning wildly for another person. This is the luck of finding someone to mirror the delight of being myself. And when the essence of myself is being gay, a gay crush will speed this feeling up. Turning the dial clockwise we are granted new structural pathways and in approaching the duet we remain steadfast in our solo material.

Rooted in my own choices I soar through space, I am winged and I am wide. I find the moves I have been looking for, the ones that truly complement who I am. And in our short time I see her do the same. I say yes to her moves and I occasionally match them. And yet I feel the buttoning up of heartbreak. The residue of cohabitation. The pain of a closed heart. I still feel this in myself, years later a day doesn’t go by that I don’t look at my dog and remember when she had two dog moms. This is not an obsessive grief it is simply the way the heart opens like a creaky window in an old farmhouse. To let in the wind of what was, to let go of what could be is in the practice of my solitude.

How do we know what to pursue in the opening? How do we know how much to give and how much to keep? Without expectation I let the crush be simple. That just for today I can be so in love with my friends that to search for love is ultimately unnecessary. There is love all around me, inside of me, in god’s vision for me. I invite in intimacy and let the fear of devastation dissolve. I trust myself to move at the pace of my nervous system.

I yearn less today, my life is so full and I have so much to turn toward. Domestic partnership will no longer save me, it never did. This knowing makes way for exploring new crossroads of companionship. Ones that exist beyond time and space. Ones that remove the merging and replace it with the side by side growing, two trees not in each other’s shade but down the row in the same forest. A shared root system with separate leaves reaching toward the same sun.

I don’t have to work for this. I just get to relish in its beauty. I just get to be in its swirl. The composition of the crush will have a beginning middle and end. Impossible to know the timeline we surrender to the mystery.

What a gift! To wander toward the imperfections of another.

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