Here is where I sit and dig my teeth into my lower lip and extract the splinter of you from my heart, so I can drip red onto the paper and make it into words. Here is where I tell you how much I ached for you and never said anything. Here is where I laugh regretfully over the word ‘crush,’ which in the end fulfils its title so perfectly. Here is where I bleed.

Fact #1:
You didn’t do anything special to make me like you.
There was no zealous epiphany or grand gesture that sent butterflies streaming through my abdomen. You were horribly wonderfully you, and that’s what did it. That is what tipped me over the edge.
I remember the precise instant everything changed. The pendulum swung into unfamiliar territory; I looked at you and a powerful case of vertigo rocked my being. I may have grabbed onto something. A desk. A chair. Anything to keep me standing until my head resettled on my shoulders and the world was normal again. In any case, you were oblivious. I watched you, both sorry and glad that you were, and struggled not to drown.

I don’t blame you. It wasn’t your fault. How could you have sensed the seismic shift I was so careful not to telegraph? How could you have known I’d go and do something so moronic as get a crush on you? I’m sorry, dear. I am. I wish I hadn’t.

Fact #2:
You think no one has ever had feelings for you.

(What an uncomfortable phrase, Had Feelings For You. Sounds like there’s some sort of compartment in my heart labelled with your name, as though if you cut it open and looked inside you’d see ash and glitter suspended like dust motes in light. Impossible, infinite).

You think this because you’re human, and humans tend to see the worst in themselves. You’re—according to you—awkward, bothersome, repressed, weird, unattractive, alone, different, inferior. You worry over the biggest things, the smallest things, and everything between. You crack open with great frequency.

However.
However.

There is someone in this world who loved you, who loves you still (in a deep deep recess of her soul), who wishes she’d been brave enough to tell you; wishes also that she’d been able to hold you and kiss you and run wild with you in every beautiful place.
You are worth someone’s feelings, and there is a heart out there full of ash and glitter in your name, beating away.
Sadly, you’ll never know whose.

Fact #3:
Crushes ******* sting.

(Don’t look, don’t look at their eyes, don’t look at the color in them or the flare, hold your breath, think of anything else, remind yourself that they can’t, they won’t, it’s stupid. Call them friend, just Friend, because that’s what they want. Don’t let them see the way you pine for them, the roaring creature in your chest. Don’t. Don’t.)

Fact #4:
You didn’t return my feelings.

Inevitably, the person we find ourselves pulled to always lets something slip. A mention of a third party with whom they’d like to (and to me it sounds so painful, so ominous) “get to know.” A giggle when a certain girl or boy passes. An admiring look thrown their way.
Worse, the object of our longing declares they like no one at all, and that’s my story. I’m sorry to say I thought, for just a bit, that you did. It’s my fault for misreading the signs. I take full blame. I’m human, too, after all, and I know very little. Who am I to project my fantasy onto you?

It still hurts, though. Aches in a way I don’t wish to remember or relive, ever. Not being liked back takes the form of black, rolling nausea, which I felt when I laid prone on my bedroom floor, eyes numb and full, breathing air all thick with dead things. It’s a sickness, a condition. A person cannot get over it any quicker or easier than they can a tumor. It can recede or overwhelm and usually one has no say in this gamble.
In my case, there is both. The pain fluctuates from day to day, lifts and falls. I see you and we laugh, and, internally, privately, I bleed. But you don’t need to know that. I will not have you see me as some weak or broken thing when what I am is on fire, hot with a glowing sadness. I’m a survivor of nuclear detonation. My heart was once spattered on these walls, this page, but I’ve gathered it up and molded it together again and it doesn’t look at all how it used to, but today it’s (almost) whole.

Fact #5:
A piece of me will always wish you wanted her the way she wanted you.

I think of other universes, split off from ours: a myriad of alternate trajectories. Perhaps in one of them we are together. Perhaps we looked and we knew and we melded. Who knows? What a silly, futile wish.

That is pain and reality. That is life.