My synapses have stopped firing. All my ideas have been replaced by a formless clapping monkey, smacking cymbals together with his mouth half-open. I knew it was coming, but I responded by speeding up instead, trying to outrun my human fallibility. I break out in a rash on one side of my jaw, bumpy and raw and red. I get on a bus and immediately get off. I cry as I walk along the street, I cry on the train, I cry into my book, fat tears soaking into the pages. I lose my appetite. I can’t sleep properly, waking up every hour, clutching my own hand. My therapist tells me I’m grieving, even if I do not recognise it as grief. It feels like my limbs are coming apart, catgut stitches dissolving under my skin. And then: crash.
It quickly becomes apparent that I’ve got no option but to take the summer off, abandon my responsibilities, abandon my research, abandon any lingering illusions that I have any capacity for productivity. I paste a scrap of text from a long-forgotten article on the wall by the front door: ‘Quit hell and fall in love, Dante might have said to me’. This is the summer of burnout. This is the summer of indulgence. This is the summer of feelings.
In the spirit of embracing my new purpose, my latest hobby is going to the coffee shop near my apartment to moon over the barista. The coffee is so strong I’m almost certainly giving myself a stomach ulcer, but not even the threat of a medical emergency can halt the obsessive thrill of a new crush.
So far all I know about him is that he drinks espresso, wears Clark Kent glasses, and reads French translations of William Burroughs, occasionally pausing between pages to stare moodily into the distance. Overcome with the shyness of a pre-pubescent girl, I studiously avoid interacting with him, instead limiting myself to brief snatches of eye contact and the occasional awkward smile over the top of my laptop.
During my third visit, our eyes meet yet again through the window as I sit on the terrace. He mouths ‘ça va?’, but rather than respond my immediate reaction is to make a bizarre expression and turn back to my screen. Despite the ostensible friendliness of this almost-interaction, I’m convinced that he’s reached breaking point, terrified of this small freckled woman with the hungry stare. It’s probably a good thing he doesn’t know I study morgues. I stay away from the cafe for two weeks, just in case.
Almost everyone I know is teetering on the edge of burnout. I encourage them all to give in, take an arrêt maladie and join me in mooching around Paris in pursuit of undefined ‘vibes’. I tell friends about my latest barista crush, and over bottles of cheap rosé we discuss what book I could bring to the cafe to read in his eyeline, weighing up the merits of Kerouac (too obvious, plus I’m not a seventeen year old boy), Fight Club (too try-hard), and a late nineteenth-century sociological study of suicide (too scary).
In the end, I return to the coffee shop with a mildly battered copy of I LOVE DICK by Chris Kraus. The whole situation has now fully descended into performance art. The book is about an artist who develops an obsessive crush on a man named Dick and proceeds, along with her husband, to write him hundreds of love letters, unpacking her complex relationship with love, sex and desire in the process. It all feels very meta, like I’m sitting here wearing one of those inception-esque t-shirts with a photograph of someone wearing the same t-shirt on it, rather than an increasingly skimpy selection of tops to try and get his attention.
The point of a crush is never the person, of course; it’s the projection, gathering small scraps - a favourite book, a raised eyebrow - from which you can construct an idealised entity. In reality he might be dull, or arrogant, or a right-wing Holocaust denier. In reality he might only be attracted to tall, skinny blondes who rarely, if ever, talk about dead bodies. We still have not exchanged a single word. The possibilities are endless.
Crushes have always made me feel simultaneously powerful and grotesque, wherein I am both buoyed by fantasy and ashamed of my own unmet needs, my endless imperfections. They force me to acknowledge that I’ve never really matured out of my teenage self, addressing the terrible realisation that, in fact, I’ve only become even more intense with age as the vocabulary I possess to describe my feelings expands. I try to circumvent my shame around this by writing about my feelings on the internet and letting those who love me see a glimpse of the inner emotional turmoil. Who am I kidding - it’s always been blatantly obvious to absolutely everyone around me. In the same day, two different friends send me memes that remind them of me, one about being seduced by someone reading me their diary and not skipping the sad parts, the other questioning if it’s really ‘too much’ to ask for undying loyalty, handwritten love letters, annotated books, and romantic late night walks among other things. Both are painfully, embarrassingly, true. I wanted to be a brain in a jar but really I’m just feelings with arms and legs.
Still, I continue to be afraid that the magnitude of my desires is disgusting. I tried my hardest to keep them hidden, tucked away somewhere in the shadows of myself, and even now I still partly believe that all my romantic liaisons have never worked out because of my voracious appetite for emotion. I think of all the ways I tried to contort myself, make myself smaller and more amenable. To ask for little, to ask for nothing. Expectations so low they were floundering in hell. I dissect the shame, but I don’t know how to bury it. Instead I turn it into theories, or stories, or bizarre performance art with an audience of one in an attempt to intellectualise my feelings.
It doesn’t help that my ego still feels bruised by a love gone wrong, and I’m grappling around in the dark for a little validation. The nourishment of small, secret smiles across a crowded room, the perfect witty retort; that addictive game, creeping along the knife-edge of plausible deniability. If I’m clever enough, witty enough, interesting enough, beautiful enough, will that cancel out my monstrous feelings?
The irony, of course, is that I relish emotional intensity in other people. Tell me all your feelings, even the terrible ones (especially the terrible ones). Send me your favourite songs, favourite poems, favourite books. Take off all your skin and let me see you exactly as you are and want you even more because of it. I’m sick of having to interpret actions rather than words, forcing myself to believe in love that manifests as absence rather than presence. I want it all, undeniable and unencumbered, even if I am afraid of what it might do. Most of all because I am afraid.