It’s summertime! Oh how us chickadees love the idea of a summer romance, don’t we? Twilight could have only been better if Stephenie had written out the details of the summer romance Bella and Edward surely had before her aging became such a problem. I’m hoping I get this post right because if I get it right, then you’ll understand the posts for the rest of the week and we'll have a theme. I love themes!
It’s been over a month ago that Robmusement had invited me over to list 10 things I love about Rob. The number one thing I said was that I love how he has become a “magical” crush for me, and I mean so much when I call it “magical.” I have a “magical” crush on Edward, too. So did Bella. She was 17, and from the first moment she saw Edward and timidly asked Jessica, “Who’s that?” she was crushing hard on Edward Anthony Masen Cullen.
I’ve heard a lot of people talk about their love of Twilight reigniting the feelings of “first love,” which I tend to agree with, but for me, Twilight has flooded my life with thoughts of the past crushes. As I said before, I watched the movie before reading the books and I developed such a crush on Rob. As I was reading Twilight, though, I had so many thoughts of different guys I had crushes on when I was younger. I’m going to leave my husband out of said scenario, even though, sometimes Edward was my husband when I read the books, but husband was not someone I had to crush on during my teen years.
I've had a lot of crushes along the way, celebrity and real life ones, and I wasn’t the type of girl who was lucky enough to date every guy she ever had a crush on, which is okay. Though we don’t know much about her preForks life other than the fact that nobody had asked her out, it wouldn’t be hard to believe that at 17, Bella had already had at least a few crushes on guys that were unrequited. Even after Edward acted so strangely that first day in Biology, she still thought about him constantly and even dreamt of him.
Isn’t that what happens with crushes? Somehow we allow someone to invade so much of our thoughts, fill a space in our heart, muddle our thought processes, affect our speech pattern, give us shivers of nervous tingles, star in our dreams, and absolutely entwine our soul with hope, anticipation, and the desire to find out what could be? It’s a buzz, a high, a little shot of our own personal brand of heroin. We come about crushes in different ways—there is the guy that makes you stop in your tracks and say, “WHO IS THAT?” and the guy that you quietly sit next to in biology class and develop an easy conversation with and decide there is potential there, and the guy you admire from afar possibly asking others for little tidbits of information on without revealing why you are interested. Edward was all of those to Bella. He was an ultimate crush, and as a vampire whose body was frozen in time, he was able to be her “forever crush.”
I have a forever crush.
Okay I have three forever crushes—my husband, Rob, and the boy I met when I was 16 years old. We’ll call him my Edward so as to keep with the Twilight theme.
My Edward was a sixteen-year-old boy I met during the summer when I was also 16. I met him where we worked. To me, he was absolutely the hottest--yet cutest--and coolest guy I had ever known. He didn’t walk, he swaggered. His hair was brown with cooper highlights and it was cut to the pefect style for the 90s, though I don't know if that haircut style had a particular name. He wasn't any particular type--not preppie, not skater, not jock, not grunge, not surfer, definitely not nerdy, and yet he could have been any of those because he was so naturally handsome. It didn't matter what he was or wasn't, he was ridiculously nice to me the first time I met him and I had an instant crush on him, yep the butterflies went up from my stomach to my ears told me so.
Within the same afternoon of meeting him though, I found out there were other girls who had already met him and were crushing on, lusting after him, throwing themselves at him, girls that seemed to know all about him, too. These girls were a couple years older than me and were very vocal about what they wanted to do with him. They spoke like most of us speak now about Rob. Because of them, I made an assumption about my Edward and shied away from him. I already knew that had we gone to high school we would have run in very different circles so I did the watch from afar thing and went on to make friends with lots of other people, successfully avoiding seeing him most days.
At some point over that summer, I realized I rarely saw those girls I had spoken with that first week after I met my Edward. (Maybe they got fired?) When I did see my Edward again he remembered my name and it completely surprised me. He even asked me how things were going with the job. From then on out, there were other flirtatious encounters. I stopped avoiding him and came up with excuses to see him. We even found ourselves hanging out together at a place where food and drink could be bought after my friends giggled and left me.
But ultimately it was just a crush. There were no declarations from him of feelings for me and I was left with "what ifs," based on things he said to me or how he acted, which is the ugly flipside of crushes for us chickadees, isn't it?
I guess I have occasionally thought about him over the years because there was something magical and special about him but not as much as I did after reading Twilight when, prophase like I said, I had thought back over some of my crushes. It was my friend, "Alice" who had met my Edward the same summer I did that decided to bring my Edward to the forefront of my thoughts one day. As we discussed some Robporn she said to me, “Of course you would be in love with this guy, he totally reminds me of (my) Edward.”
WAIT. JUST. A. MINUTE. AND. HOLY. EFFING. MR. TWILIGHT!
She was right! Don't get me wrong, They don't look exactly alike but they both have that "there's something about him" quality that girls were falling over themselves for, including me.
But if you go back and read my description of my Edward you might be able to see the similiarities. I wish I had a picture to show you chickadees but he's not of Facebook. Yes I'm guilty of looking him up.
But you know what I decided?
Maybe I don't need to see what he looks like 20ish some years later, who he is married to, or how many kids he has. Sure I would like to think that he is still hot and a really nice guy, but maybe I don't want to know if he ended up with a a horrible receding hairline and lost his license from a DWI or anything crazy like that. I have no bad feelings toward him, only giddy schoolgirl memories, and I would prefer he stay in my memories, frozen in time at 16 years old, as a forever crush.
Where my giddy stories about flirtations and exchanges with a certain sixteen-year-old boy ends, my now more mature lusty thoughts of Rob can begin, and both will reside in a special place in my heart as a "magical, forever crush."
Did you miss the part where I said my life has been flooded with thoughts of my past crushes? The story doesn't end there. Come back for the next post.
Do You have a Real Life Forever Crush?
Tell me in the comments!
-TT
