Shrödinger’s Crush

One night with you and suddenly I’m a walking cliche. These phantom feelings pulled me over on the desert highway out of town and hijacked my mind. I am pretty sure this hapless state is the thing people hope for after a date.

I have turned into my own science experiment. In my lab coat I track the cycling emotional states, transcribing the shifting storms of rhetoric on my clipboard. Stopwatch in hand I time the bouts of anxious hysteria or feigned indifference, pushing my glasses up my nose as I coolly confer with my colleagues. 

My heart, ever untamed, exiled, and emaciated as a mustang, has morphed to a humiliatingly transparent gelatinous blob on the beach. With disgusted disdain I probe at it with the toe of my shoe. The way I feel about you is equally alien, curious and queer, fascinatingly strange. There is no logical explanation for my tender disposition. Without knowing you, I really, really just like that thing you do where you exist.

With pinched nose and fingers I lift this deflated character up to inspect it.  Wasn’t this poor girl, just days ago, grand and untouchable? Love nonconsenually makes prattling school girls of us all.

This is Shrödinger’s crush. Unobserved, it is in any state. Like a child reaching again for a hot oven, I clench my eyes shut and try to pin it down. Panicked, frantic, with no external input whatsoever, the flaming pinball in my heart hits the buzzers of all my hopes and insecurities unrelentingly and in splendidly random order. 

In the meantime, scenarios intrusively expounding in my imagination, I smile and nod and pretend to be wherever I am.

We don’t need to meet again. We likely never will. We will flirt from a distance and one of us will get bored or distracted. We might try at love and part ways bitterly or amicably. Best case scenario we are wildly happy until one of us dies. 

Let’s save ourselves the trouble and skip it. My fantasy of everything has already happened anyway, object of affection not included nor required.