When life gives you lemons....

So, you have all been introduced to my current crush situation, I feel like I should give more context to this.

While this is the first crush I have had in my thirties, I have had several others before hitting the 3rd floor. And there was one in particular that I want to talk about.

My behaviour with my current crush situation has made me pause and think to remember how I usually behave with crushes.
While I don't remember them in detail, this one stands out.

I had a crush once, on a guy. He was tall, slim and flat. His frame was lean enough to be called thin but not thin enough to cause concern. His skin wasn't exactly the colour of chocolate, it was closer to that of the kind of creamed coffee a lactose intolerant person who was trying to push his luck would take. And as with all my crushes, he had a generous beard.

Being a chatterbox, I am nearly always drawn to quiet people and he was no exception.
He had full lips that were very defined, they were not the type that blended into the face. While he didn't have the most expressive eyes, I could always tell when he found something amusing from his eyes. I liked that. And while he was always courteous and pretending to be oblivious to the very massive crush I had on him, he treated me kindly.

In retrospect, I find that I have always been someone who embraced the feelings that I get the privilege to feel. And so, I wasn't struggling with my crush, thinking of ways to come out of it. I just accepted it, knowing that it would run it's course and then fade off as they all did.

But something somewhere must have gone out of alignment as it became a little more than that. 
That was when I realised that this was at the time, one of the times that life had given me lemons. Before that realization, I was under the impression that I had received a sweet orange.

But unlike the saying, I didn't make lemonade. I threw the whole lemon away. 
I made the conscious decision to kill that crush. It did crush me, it hurt but I did. I enjoyed the last conversation where I was feeling like he hung the moon and the stars while knowing intellectually that he didn't, enjoyed every minute we spent together with friends until we parted ways. 

We hugged goodbye and we went to our various homes.
The goodbye I said that day wasn't just "goodbye Ifeanyi" it was "goodbye my crush".

So the next week, I was honest in greeting him "hello, Ifeanyi". Because I had let go of the idea of him that I had built up in my mind and saying hello the real him. 

But I was sad on my own. My heart may not have broken but it did crack at the seam. And that is because a crush is a relationship you get into with the person in your mind. A one sided relationship that you also needed to decide the breakup on your own.

And on that rainy day when I broke off my one sided relationship with my crush, it was because I decided that when life gives you lemons, you can choose not to make lemonade. And that's what I did.

But that was then and this is now. I like this current crush that I have. And I don't think he's a lemon, he's a sweet orange.

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