Magic is everywhere. It’s watching a sunset being painted across an evening sky, it’s in the smell of an old book, it’s in a Ben and Jerry’s tub when we’re heartbroken, but most of all, it’s in the butterflies that rage war in our stomach when we run into our favorite crush.
I say favorite because, if you’re anything like me, you have a crush for every passing season, every class, and you know exactly where to sit between breaks in your schedule just to get a chance to shyly smile at them. Though if you can’t relate, that’s fine too, you just might be normal. I, on the other hand, fall into an entirely new category of boy crazy, the kind Mariah Carey would sing “Obsessed” to at the Staples Center.
At 22 I practically have a Ph.D in falling for all the wrong guys at the worst possible time in their lives. From too young and too old, to too dazed and confused. Recently, I got over a dude who was convinced he was Jesus. The kind of dude that’s always late because he’s always on a skateboard and only seems to own tie-dye t’s and huff socks (you all know exactly the type of guy I’m talking about). F*ck, I guess you could call me a Mary Magdalene of sorts.
With this kind of life comes a level of emotional masochism only someone who listens to “Halo” on repeat would understand. Still, Alan Watts said, “we cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.” Thus, I’ve come to seize every opportunity at a broken heart as a step closer to whatever happily-ever-after life has to offer me. Whether it’s becoming a cheese maker at a Danish farm or maybe becoming the president’s mistress. I don’t know, I keep my options open, or maybe I’ve been watching too much Scandal; give me a bottle of wine and I become a fearless engine of love and disaster. My grandmother became a lawyer at 40, and Britney Spears survived 2007, so I’ve come to realize that even when the odds are against you, nothing is truly impossible.
However, there’s a particular villain who seems to stand in the way of even the most beautiful and intellectual wonder women of our generation. He’s as charming as a comic book hero (I’m so about that Deadpool kind of life). He knows exactly how to make you laugh, and whenever you’re close to leaving him he manages to make you fall even more in love. You care for him like pumpkin patch baby but you f*ck him like a dolphin on Viagra. He’s the Peter Pan in your life and every girl that comes into his, is his favorite Wendy.
You dump him, and he’s already wasted with his army of lost boys talking about last week’s silly grown up; you get back together and he’s telling his mom that one day he might marry you. He’s a man-child who argues about Androids and iPhones with the fervor of a Harvard professor, but flakes out like off brand toilet paper when you really wish you had Charmin’. He’s hot and he’s cold. He’s the personification of Denny’s; he feels right in the moment and opens a menu of possibilities, but in the morning you still wake up with heartburn and a hangover. There come your friends, like aspirin and pizza, a life vest after a tsunami, with a never-ending box full of cliché quotes you love to hear, and all the hugs you need to feel.
But that’s the thing about hangovers, even when you just barely manage to survive every inch of the bruised, hazy, boozy pain, you just don’t see them coming. It’s a hard knock life, and when it comes to love we’re all bunch of toddlers high on chemistry and bad decisions. Decisions, that like Trump, end up building walls around you, leaving you and your possibilities to foot the bill.
‘Cause I know about your work ethic, I know about your coffee fueled evenings typing away essays and slowly chipping at your chemistry book. I know about those little moments you spend googling your dream school and/or your favorite city. I know about the nights you can’t sleep because you can’t imagine a future without him, but everything seems hazy when he stands in the way, like driving with the sun in your eyes.
“To die would be an awfully big adventure,” it’s funny, sometimes I wonder if Peter Pan was talking about falling in or out love. Pixie dust, a private island, and a boy dripping with passions.. It’s never easy to walk away from what we once thought was our happily ever after, but Wendy did, and someday, just like a toddler learning her way, you’ll learn how to walk away from him.