The Revolving Doors of My Heart
A Promise to My Apocalyptic Crush
Article by Hope Shea Art by Koli Razinfindandy
I fall in love too fast. I don’t know why I’m like this, I just am. There is never any rhyme or reason to the fall, and it happens so fast I don’t even know I’ve fallen until he leaves, and I notice how empty I am without him. My heart is a realm with its own gravity. Earth’s gravity is slow and lazy, my gravity hungry and impatient, dragging down my emotions and consuming them immediately; her appetite is insatiable. I go through crushes fast; she goes through them even faster. She is a black hole of sorts, my heart. I think it’s her defense mechanism; she loves so much that she leaves no time for me to decide if I too am in love before she moves on to the next shiny boy.
When you’re high, it feels like the world is spinning and there is nothing you can do to stop it. My heart is on a constant high. She never stops spinning, her revolving door of crushes. I beg her to stop for the sake of my clarity. Truthfully, I do it for my sanity. Of course, she never listens. Until she met you.
Meeting you was like a torrential rain stopping mid-flight. It was like the universe hitting absolute zero. It was like daydreaming in class before the content hits you and you have that lightbulb moment. When I first saw you, I felt like we were destined to meet. You froze my heart in a good way. You made my heart shut up. You made me use my brain. For once, my heart and I were in agreement: we wanted more. All we could focus on was you. Everything was you. You, stopping the noise. You, bringing sobriety to a high. You, being perfect in such a way I feared ruining.
I am nothing that you want. I’m aware. I’m not your type, and based off your Instagram, you're way out of my league. But still, I like you, because time with you is like spending time in heaven before getting spit back out into reality.
The first thing I liked about you was your vulnerability. I liked how you gave me a small part of you. The part that no one else saw. I got to see you run your hands through your hair in frustration. I'm the one who got to soothe you. I would have given you permission to break me too, you only needed to ask. I’m happy I got to push you beyond what you thought you were capable of, and I’m glad you listened to my instructions. I liked how you scrunched your eyebrows when you were confused. I liked when you interrupted me for clarification.
You have a curious mind and a courageous heart. You insist on learning things you’re bad at, despite being proficient in almost everything you do. You want to grow and improve, and you show others that every day. You are subtle and nuanced, yet open and honest. You are like folklore, the way your name travels on people’s lips as they admire and lust for you. You became more than just whispers in the wind when I met you. You earned a name, a face, a persona. And your vulnerability with me showed that you cared not for pretense or reputation, but rather just for me and you and us. I liked that a lot.
The second thing I liked about you was your punctuality. My heart is a judge who bears witness to the character of everyone she pursues. Never in her eighteen years of life had she met someone like you. I’ve been complimented on being punctual before, I never realized until I came to college how uncommon a trait it was. I like how I expected you to be late to our first meeting because I’d never met a punctual man, but you proved me wrong as you sat there waiting for me. You were so cute when your head snapped up at everyone walking by, wondering if they were me. By respecting my time, you respected me, and in turn I admired you. You don’t waste time, and you are civil. You are both the bare minimum and the gold standard.
I like when it’s just you and me and I feel like I have your full attention, like I mean something. My phone sits quiet off to the side, the lock screen usually dark. I’m not that busy. Not like you. You check your phone when you start to get bored of me and our time together. Your leg bounces when you want to leave, and your fidgeting intensifies. Every rap of your finger on the table is a gavel condemning me to a life without you, and when you gaze at the clock it’s like you turn your back on me and my offering to you. I wish I could entertain you forever.
The third thing I liked about you was your eyes. You weren’t the first blue-eyed boy to steal my heart.
We were eighth grade nerds conducting a mock trial. I was a prosecutor, he the witness. I stared at his eyes while questioning him. I don’t remember what I was saying. I just remember how transparent his eyes were, how quick they were to betray emotion. His shock at my questioning, his defiance at being caught in a lie, his mirthful resignation when he realized he was beyond saving; I witnessed it all in his irises. I shook his hand when he admitted defeat and watched the twinkle of the waves in his ocean blue eyes. As Taylor Swift says, it's easy to sink and drown and die in them.
Your eyes are not ocean blue. They are like snowflakes that are cold and heartless because they refuse to express color or emotion. Too light, too perfect, and so unlike everyone else.
Too late, I realized that I like everything about you. I like how you wake up early in the morning and text me when I’m still in bed; you don’t lack initiative like all the other guys I fall for. I like how you talk over everyone and are unapologetic about your opinions because you are bold in ways I could never be. I like how you give me confidence because you have so much to share. I like that you tower more than a foot over me, reminding me of how unattainable you are. I like how you hold the door open for others because your mother raised you with manners. I like how you don’t follow me back on Instagram. It makes me think about you more.
You’re elusive, like the stars. I haven’t heard you laugh. I have only seen you half smile and do that little grunt of a laugh that doesn’t come from the heart, but from politeness. You haven’t heard me laugh either. If I heard your real laugh, I don’t think I would ever stop wanting it.
You’re enigmatic, like the moon. I want to know everything about you, both the side that the world can see and the side that only outer space can. I want to hear about your craters and depravities, the way you pull me like a tide and how you soar above the world. I want to know about your parents, your siblings, your friends. I want to know about your childhood, your memories, your hobbies. I want to pick your mind, and I want you to tear into mine. What’s your favorite food? Mine is chocolate. What is your favorite color? Mine is purple. What’s your zodiac? I’m a Capricorn. Where are your scars from? Would you care to hear about mine? I taught you how to write an essay, but who taught you how to kiss someone? Who taught you how to stroke their hair, to make their heart flutter? Who taught you your charm, your magnetic energy that pulls me in? Do you know you have this power? Have you perfected it over the years, or were you born this way? Is this another one of your talents, winning the game of love one hopeless heart at a time? I want you to like me enough to want to tell me. I don’t want to beg for answers.
I don’t like girls being jealous of me. I don’t like the animosity I feel when they know you value your time with me more than them. I dislike how you don’t seem to trust me enough to turn on your read receipts, how you fist bump me and refuse to hug me. I don’t like how you can be with me in private and act like a total stranger in public. Girls wouldn’t be jealous if they knew what we were really like.
The sad thing about the frost you cast on my heart was that it didn’t last. Like on Earth, frost is a fleeting beauty of night. Eventually, daylight breaks through and turns the ice into dew. I have never been a fan of this reality. That’s why I sleep with blackout curtains and why I prefer late nights to early mornings; the day is the promise of everything unpleasant. During the day, I am forced to be away from you. I have to go to school and complete menial tasks that teach me nothing about love or life. The day is where I need to pretend to be someone organized, someone intelligent, someone who is strong, motivated, ambitious. The night is everything good about this world. It is a promise of romance and love, of dalliances and dances with the serenade of comets and saucers. In the day you are gone, and so is my heart, because you take it with you. In the night I can become a blubbering idiot who loses all sense of self with you.
You fascinate me, you excite me, you calm me. My hours with you felt like no time at all. You left too soon. You left before I was ready. You took what you needed from me and disappeared, like smoke. You stole my words, my thoughts, my time, my conscience. I am forever stuck in your elusive shadow; you’re just that tall. The world is too small for you. You’re just too goddamn perfect.
The day before our last, I dreamed I died in a snowstorm. I was alone, drowning and suffocating in a lonely abyss. I was a bystander to nature’s quarrel with love. Nature raged and took that anger out on a young couple standing near me. They had held hands in the face of the storm, but were eventually ripped apart by the wind. They might have survived if they hadn’t opened their mouths to call out for each other, but they were in love, and so they did. They were crushed mercilessly. Any words of love or yearning they might have had for one another died when they did, separated and alone. I don’t want to die, not like that. Not pining after a love I would never find again because of forces I couldn’t control.
Liking you is a bit like dying in a snowstorm. You swooped down from the sky long enough to torment me, but not long enough to appreciate me. After your ascension, I find myself getting lost in the apocalyptic turmoil of your aftermath. As if we had been operating on borrowed time, my heart returned to her endless search for the one.
She’s looking for someone to ground her again. She’s looking for you.
That period of time with you - that time where I was enveloped by the quiet and comforting sound of you - was my everything. It was my safe haven. It was blue eyes in the middle of a hurricane. It was you holding my hand in a snowstorm and not letting go.
Now you’re gone and my heart is weeding through everyone she can and deeming them unworthy of replacing you.
That guy I smoked with and confided in on the balcony. That guy who would walk with me every morning to class. That guy who taught me work-life balance and how to quote John Locke.
None of them really compare to you. My heart grows angrier and more dejected at every failed attempt. Like hands on a clock, I keep chasing you through the revolving doors of my heart to return to a time when we were together. As my left hand grips the door and pushes, my right hand wipes tears that too often stream down my cheeks. Sometimes, when I stop pushing against the doors of fate so that I can catch my breath, I attempt to draw you and your memory back into my heart before all traces of you are gone forever.
If you ever return to me, will you stop my heart again? Will you be able to ground me again? Can you stop my endless circling? You never promised me anything, and I almost wish you would have. But promises are as fickle as the weather, and I probably would have died waiting for you to fulfill one. So, promise me no promises, and I will promise you the entirety of my cherished nothing in return.