tuckova

so you’re nine, and you’re visiting your friend, and you’re both
kissing the picture of david cassidy on her sister’s record, which you
have borrowed for the purpose of kissing this picture. to be honest you
don’t get it, but it seems expected, and since she’s nice enough to play
with you, despite being popular (which you are not), kissing a picture
seems a small price.

or age thirteen with another friend after you both have finished singing all
your favorite songs into your tickle deodorant, you talk about how much
you both love whichever star, which in this memory is paul stanley, the
guy from KISS with the star on his right eye. you do not actually know much
about paul stanley but having a crush on him seems, again, important.
his favorite color, you sigh, is purple, which is also your favorite
color, and you love him so much, you were made for loving him, baby.

and this goes on, through junior high and high school, these obsessive
crushes that you do not get and yet become increasingly adept at
faking, since you are an outstanding liar. the whole thing seems really
pointless: what possible purpose does liking someone who does not like
you back, who possibly does not know you exist, serve? and then there
are practicalities, like they’re already married or they’re about a
thousand years old or whatever.

except now you are thinking about it, that what these crushes did was
train girls for the experience of unrequited love. it seems a
stretch but you just learned that tickling trains you for combat so
that crush on judson scott might have been helpful, if you hadn’t been
faking it.

if, for example, you had been trained for unrequited love in
high school, it might not have messed you up so badly when that one man
came to visit later, asked you to marry him, and then called you a week
later (when he’d gotten back home) to discuss what to do on his upcoming date with a girl
who he said was not as smart as you are but was there, which you were
not. again you are fortunately good at faking your feelings, so you
gave him
some advice. a movie and a sunset, it was, a movie that required some
hand-holding and a hill from which you had watched the sunset yourself: it was a great view. you generally try
not to think about that phone call. it was, you imagine, what the ninth gate must
be for people who had crushes on johnny depp.

and so anyway now you are older and your training in unrequited love
has been basically like bloody mel gibson style slaughter when what you
have ever wanted is some tickling. and you’re noticing that you do
better when you don’t care what happens. when you like someone without
thinking for a minute whether it is practical or feasible or reasonable
or even right. and so what you are
practicing now, you realize, is crushes. you still can’t handle stars,
because it’s too much like artwork, which you love to admire but do not
love to love. but it’s the same feeling you observed in your friends
those years ago: the desire to know everything. the feeling that every
small thing is a window on further fascination. the near-complete
detachment from caring whether the object reciprocates. the total disregard for practicality.

this is working pretty well for you. you had some questions this
weekend over whether maybe it wasn’t a little…skeevy… to objectify
people like this. whether perhaps it wouldn’t be healthier for you to
want a return on your investments. whether it serves any purpose, since
it’s not like you can retroactively protect your damaged heart. but
then you shoved some more wood in the chipper and thought about long
fingers and puns and in jokes and how it’s not really about you at all,
these crushes, but about being a mirror for people who might otherwise
be afraid to look at themselves and are therefore missing out on what you can see. it perhaps serves no purpose and it is certainly not practical, but it is, you have to admit, terribly fun.