Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
– Rumi
Crushing is a delightful thing. It makes your heart beat faster, and your cheeks flush pink with no more than a thought. I don’t recommend having a crush on your best friend. There is too much to lose. Having a crush on the Work Bestie didn’t just give me butterflies; it gave me pterodactyls. Spending time with him was terrifying. It was dangerous. It was the best.
I was not the first to know I had a crush on my Work Bestie. Almost exactly a year after I’d decided we couldn’t be friends anymore, he called me out of the blue to wish me a Merry Christmas. After that, he kept calling and texting, not like a courtship, but like we were friends again. I had missed my friend so much. Of course, I was excited to be back in touch. I’d be texting with him, when my teenage daughter would ask how he was… by name. I asked her how she knew who I was texting with, and she said I only smile like that when it’s him. I denied it emphatically, blushing all the while.
I’d lived enough life to know better. This story was not going to end well. I didn’t want another year of being unable to reach out to my friend. I needed this friendship. Feelings screw everything up. These facts did nothing to dampen my giddiness. I wanted him something awful, almost as badly as I wanted to not want him.
I am not religious, but when all else fails, I will pray. Almost as often as I would think of him, I would pray to have my feelings change. Make this longing stop. All I wanted to want was friendship, and I wanted to return to how we used to be so comfortable together. Sometimes the exercise of asking is enough to find clarity. Prayers are answered more often than we give them credit for. It’s just that, very often, the answer is no. One of the many times I pleaded with God, the Universe, and anyone else who might hear me to make the feelings stop, I heard an answer. I heard it as clearly as if it had been said aloud, “remove the obstacles.”
There was a weird sense of calm that came with this epiphany. More than anything, I wanted to love and to be loved, and the answer wasn’t in pursuing or playing hard to get. It almost certainly wasn’t going to be found by smacking my heart down every time it got excited. I just had to remove the obstacles to love – shift the focus from crushing, or not crushing, back to creating the kind of life that has room for love. So I stopped playing tug-o-war with my heart and sublimated all that energy into creating and fine-tuning my life as a whole.
He was on his way to a building gig in Vegas when he stopped by for what I assumed would be a short visit. We were talking and listening to music, all cuddled up on the couch, which wasn’t uncommon for us on cold nights. What was unusual is that I had the house all to myself that night. The usual chaperones were elsewhere for the weekend.
The Work Bestie and I were reclined on the ridiculously red velvet couch I had at the time, his back to me as he rested his head on my chest. He asked me if he should cut his hair. I ran my fingers through it and told him I liked it long, but employers usually like it short. Then things went from platonic to playful to something else entirely. Three years after the night lightning struck, we weren’t just friends-who-flirt anymore. We were friends-who-fool-around.
My iTunes is a jerk. A thousand songs in that playlist, and it insisted on playing only the most uncomfortably pointed tracks that night. It was as subtle as an animated singing crawfish or a castle’s worth of enchanted furniture playing matchmaker, but I am not a Disney princess. My fairy tales are dark and dangerous, and the things he made me feel that night are not for general audiences. The barrage of love songs and lust songs, awkward as it was, only intensified the already overwhelming temptation to take things to the bedroom – away from the embarrassing music and the awkward physical constraints of the couch.
I wasn’t ready to take things as far as they would go in bed. A part of me felt such urgency, in case this was the last chance, in case he came to his senses the next day. That same fear held me back, though. I never wanted a one-night stand. I want to love and be loved and to build something. If he wasn’t going to return, it was better for my heart to have held something in reserve, even if it meant never knowing everything I wanted to know.
We said goodbye before it was too late for him to drive the rest of the way, even though I didn’t want to let him go. I needed to keep taking things slow, as slowly as possible. He was already the person I told all my secrets to, someone I loved, and the embrace that felt like home. There was too much at stake. It had been a long crush in a longer friendship. When he finally started something, he was well worth the wait. All I could do now was pray that it would be worth the risk.
Our last relationships had been difficult to get through and difficult to get out of. I don’t think either of us wanted to rush into anything. I needed to take my time to see where things went without either of us putting pressure on it. Thankfully, he is a patient soul. I went into this expecting to get my heart broken but praying not to. I wasn’t smart enough to see how this could work out, but with all of my heart, I knew I wanted it to.
He called me the next day, and the day after that. Hallelujah, he wasn’t disappearing. Neither were my feelings. He kept flirting with me, and occasionally fooling around with me, and always making me smile so goofy that anyone paying attention knew that I was already a goner.
I don’t want no one to squeeze me
They might take away my life
I just want someone to hold me
Oh and rock me through the night
This youthful heart can love you
Yes and give you what you need
I said this youthful heart can love you
Oh and give you what you need
But I’m too old to go chasin’ you around
Wastin’ my precious energy– Tracy Chapman
Give Me One Reason
Crystal, Clearly 
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