Crush

Is it true that everyone falls in love twice? Is it true that no one ever really gets a first love?

I have often wondered why it gets harder to fall for someone the older you grow. Yes, the pool of people worth falling for keeps shrinking, but I think the real reason lies elsewhere. You lose the innocence of being a child. Think back to your teenage years, a glance held a moment too long was reason enough to fall, a small kindness was enough to feel like everything. The girl next door was always the loveliest one there was. None of us thought about caste, or family, or where any of it was going. We were only honest about the present, and how beautifully it existed.

Now imagine a girl joins your office, and she is lovely. Every head turns when she walks past. You invent reasons to speak to her. You lie awake at night thinking of her, certain, somehow, that she might be the one.

Every time she crosses your mind, you feel it, a pull low in the stomach, a tremor along your arms, a flutter caught somewhere in your chest. To meet her. To touch her hand. To simply be near her. It becomes an ache you cannot quite explain, a wildness you did not know you carried.

You live entirely inside that feeling. Colours seem sharper. You feel sharper too, more clever, more charming than you have any right to be. You forget to eat. You wait for the phone to ring, for a message to arrive, and when the waiting becomes too much to hold, you reach for a pen and a scrap of paper.

Just to let it all spill out, in words.