Crushes suck. This is a fact that I, Rose Nymphadora Granger-Weasley, have come to know through first hand experience. Crushes really suck.
First it's just the way you think they're fit. Might be at a quidditch game, or when the extremely chatty girls in your dorm point it out. And then you like their personality; it's really sweet how he always keeps a spare Slytherin scarf for his best mate who always complains about being cold. And then you notice all the little things. Like the way he holds his pencil between his middle and ring finger. Like the way his satchel is always bursting at the seams. Or the fact he always sits at the same table in the library (apart from Saturday mornings when he inevitably sits at the table nearest the wall that borders the transfiguration classroom).
And then the knut drops.
Oh shit.
And bam; as the realisation that you now have someone to make your heart beat faster and teach you the joys of unrequited love hits, so does the obsession.
You can't control the glances. Every morning you look at his place (yes, he always sits in the same place) as he walks in at eight. You can't control the way your eyes start to him during third period herbology. You can't control the way your eyes follow him during quidditch; so much so that you miss the gameplay. And so it goes until you eventually train yourself to not look. To not look as he sits behind you having come late to potions. To not look as he reads each textbook on his table during late nights in the library's. To not look as he dives for the quaffle in the last quidditch game of the season. And you don't look so much that you learn what he's doing by just listening.
You can't control the way your heart beats. The way you can't seem to think straight when a professor asks you a question and you can feel his stares. You can't control picking apart every little thing that you did to try and find out if he noticed you. You can't control the way you think of him at night. The way you can't sleep. The way he is imprinted in your eyelids.
And you start to tune yourself to hear his name. Every time someone mentions him you listen. Every time you hear it dropped in a conversation you wait for something more to be said, anxious to hear anything - literally anything - to stop your craving.
You begin to hear him in songs. You begin to notice how they all seem to speak right to you. And it ruins the songs for you because you always hear them in it.
But whilst these all hurt, nothing bites you in the back as much as the hope. The hope that maybe he likes you back. Like maybe he was actually watching you the time he almost fell off his broom. The hope that maybe your best friend is right and he watches you in the mornings as you eat breakfast. Nothing stuns more than knowing you dared to hope - even for a moment - that he might want you too.
Sometimes you get rid of it. Hear something that changes your opinion of him so drastically it will never change back. Sometimes you just wake up and the golden shimmer around him is gone. Or sometimes you convince yourself that you have got over him and you have, mostly. Perhaps you still hear him in the songs and it hurts just a little bit. Maybe you suddenly see something that used to make your heart beat wildly and it all come flooding back.
But sometimes it never goes away. And it hurts all the way up to seventh year when you two are heads together. And it means you can't get over him because you practically live with him.
There's a reason it's not called a crush when you start dating. It's because the crushing feeling disappears and you finally worked it out.
Crushes really suck. That's a fact that is true. And as I walk down the aisle to Scorpius Malfoy, my resident crush of five years before we started dating, I am bloody glad I never have to deal with them again.
