How to have a crush Max Chu
When Paloma reads in class, it makes me want to shoot myself. Perhaps that’s the feeling of a
crush compounding on itself, like space, like liquid gravity compiling matter into diamonds with a brown
haired white girl at its core. The pressure is staggering and infinite, and I pull my hat low so that no one
can see the brain that is surely pouring out from my ears.
Sometimes a crush is a survival tactic. Sometimes not. Sometimes, it feels like I'm bleeding out
on the floor for her, and all she’s done is sat next to me and shown me her hangnail on her left hand ring
finger. I pick through my body to try and find anything as indulgent and erotic. I come up short. That
evening, a crush becomes a utilitarian thing, designed to lift one up and out of a mire of mortal terror.
Sometimes, I get a text that says “I think we were made for each other.” It’s midnight, and I’m
walking along the backside of Potrero Hill.
Sometimes, I send a text that says “there’s nothing between us, right?” I’m lying prone across the
top porch step, basking in the light of the first warm day of the year, hoping she might call me wrong.
Sometimes I watch her get stung by a wasp, right on the scalp. After I pull the stinger out of her
skull, she texts me for months.
Sometimes, he puts his sleeping bag next to mine without me asking. He whispers to me, just
barely louder than the babbling of the river.
Boys are mostly like jackals to me: too cunning. They coat themselves in seal urine and carrion
smells just so that they might get one opportunity to carry off the seal pup in their jaws. He is the
exception. He is the carrion, I am the urine, culpable in the death and disinvited to the feast. There was a
boy who stood with me in a park and he introduced us as cousins as a joke. That was back when I could
look out my dorm room window and see throngs of drinkers in the city-lights. He lived two floors above
me, and when he said he had something to show me, I said I had a fear of heights and never saw him
again.
Most of the time, a crush seeks to be a drowning thing, like stones around the ankles. I find
myself floundering in my bed like it’s a body of water, visions of how she’d look at a table for two at a
steakhouse uptown, visions of a first, drunken kiss on a doorstep of a party, visions of flesh and teeth, spit
and moans. I restlessly thrash amongst my duvet.
I went back to the house I was born in, and found they cut the ivy down. The lattice had left a
sun-bleached pattern along the side of the house, which is to give you an idea about the kind of headspace
I found myself in when I saw Satoro in the corner store, buying beers with his mom.
“Do you still live in the same spot?” I asked him. He couldn’t seem to look me in the eyes. His
mom smacked him with the fifteen dollars in her hand and said “look at him, Satoro. He’s your oldest
friend!” and Satoro looked at me. Maybe he was truly different than I remember, but for some reason, I
couldn’t make out any changes. His arms were still as thin as when we were five, and he still smelled of
popcorn and concrete. His childhood lingered inside of me and the gulf of nostalgia in my heart widened
abruptly.
That same week, she and I found ourselves wandering along the border of SOMA in the dead of
night. Suddenly, she stopped in the middle of a block and said “this is where I was born.” There was a
house there, and wild ivy crept along a red garage. She had a home, just like I did, and she brought me
through the twisting city streets to its front door. I recognized the gulf for what it was: survival. I had felt
it, too. The exhilaration of finding yourself in another person never goes away.
Sometimes, you meet a crush at the beach, swimming between the retirees doing laps in the
afternoon surf. You both dry off on the roof of the car park next to the beach.
Sometimes, you find a crush on a roof in Brooklyn, between rounds of cards. She will have stolen
a bottle of wine from her neighbors, and asks, “do you hook up?”
Sometimes a crush shows you her signature in Icelandic, and tells you that she was going to try
and work as a gravedigger over the summer.
I think people were designed to tear into each other; to become atomically entwined. That’s sort
of what it’s like to have a crush. There’s no such thing as a still body of water.
One day you find that you can finally take the clothes off the floor of your room. You buy
groceries, and on the way, you look at the trees. City pigeons pluck at the fresh buds of leafless branches.
You notice that something in your brain chemistry has shifted. Something’s different.
Keep this in mind when you find yourself with a crush.
ed hopper, rocks and sand, 1916
Max Chu is a teacher, writer, and digital artist working in Queens, New York. Most of his effort these days goes into making beautiful books with the art collective Active Chapter. His personal work, when he has time for it, revolves around perversion, neuroses, and interpersonal love (although those are all the same thing, aren't they...)
https://maxchu.cargo.site/