speaking of crushes, i thought abt my first crush today. i was 9 or 10 and heart racing head pounding toes tingling i was drinking lemonade in my grandma's kitchen when he was sent in. this tall handsome preppy boy of 12 sat arrogant in his chair sipping on his lemonade casually ignoring me and i knew i had to summon the forces inside me to impress him. he spoke. effortless accent of superiority making some egotistical claim abt him earning the highest scores in his class. hmmmm. imagine how cool i was at that point when i propped my head up and spoke down to him stating as-a-matter-of-factly that it was realistically impossible to get a 20/20 (vingt-sur-vingt) on an essay BUT that i - moi - had scored the highest REAL score in MY class, hmph and smile. (impressed now impressed hmmm are you?)
sip sip lemonade more lemonade slurp
oh yeah?
yeah.
and we duelled with our minds until his parents took him away (i am sorry to say that our conversation ran along the captivating lines of a silly fly destined to fly its way between two cars heading towards each other and calculating the time it took)
he left feeling smug and i was left walking on clouds replaying our passionate encounter over lemonade and flies countless times in my mind
we saw each other sporadically throughout the year and i had the fortuitous occasion of engraving my memory in his brain indefinitely at one point by performing some magic card trick on him which i was so proud of and he uncovered immediately to my heart-breaking dismay
he was always ahead of the game and the more ahead he was the more head-over i was over him and you have to understand that it was like auto-combustion for a 9 year old who knew nothing about men or the world
i never saw him again after that year (sorry)
i have no clue as to what befell him in his future - for all i know he may be selling lemonade to little giggly girls in the zoo - but i know now that we were doing was flirting - yes i did it in the most failure-eliciting way possible - but that's what it was.

so flirting - throwing a challenge, a curt nod incomplete in the direction of the Other, opening the door to the mystery of You, leaving it ajar so he can catch just a tantalizing whiff of it and no more

can you live without it?

i don't know. i do know that it makes life all the more exciting.
a whispered comment a burning look an inviting smile a brush of an arm can do it

and for a breeze of a second that skipped beat that sharp breath that exhilarating rush pull the shades up and let the sunshine in briefly on a greyish day

a friend bumped into him years later, in adulthood, and somehow my name came up in conversation

and he said: she's the one who gave me this problem once, wait, let me think, yes, the problem of the - ahem -the fly!!
(cringe)