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When I read about international Crush Day, celebrated on February 20th, (don’t ask me what it is or where does it come from), I tried to remember my first crush.

Usually your first crush comes very early in your life, so early that you are not even capable of remembering it.  My first crush, or at least the one I still remember, happened when I was at school.  I must have been 11 years old.  His name was Raffi and he was few years older than me.

I don’t remember what he looked like, except for the few pimples he had all over his face, but I certainly remember how he made me feel.  Or how my feelings for him made me feel.  Or how I made myself feel, since all this was in my head.

It was a beautiful feeling in the beginning.  I would wake up in the morning and think about him.  I would spend hours in front of the mirror thinking what to wear to make myself look beautiful, in case he noticed me that day.  It made me become more stylish and creative, day after day.  I would spend my time trying to see how to make myself look better and attractive.  Before my crush I never looked at myself this way.  You just …don’t care how you look.  And then came Raffi and the idea of him looking at me, motivated me to bring the best in me.

It was certainly a puppy love.  I never spoke to him, he never spoke to me.  The only contact we have ever had was staring at each other in the corridor, during lunch break.

My entire day would evolve around seeing him.  I would walk the corridor back and forth, looking for him, making him noticing me, and then I would ask my girlfriend: “did he looked at me?”

The feeling I had, when I used to see him, was overwhelming.  It was a warm sensation, that made me feel so strong and yet so weak.  And if he ever looked at me, I would feel as if I was the most beautiful person in the universe.  I would feel powerful, fearless, cute and funny.

One day I saw Raffi talking to a girl, it made me sad.  I started researching to learn everything about her.  I wanted to know what made her so special?  What made her better than me?

Day after day Raffi was spending his lunch break with her.  And my heart was broken.

I was sad, weak, doubting myself all the time.  Mornings didn’t feel good any more, and waking up to go to school had no meaning.  I wanted to spend my days in bed, curled in a foetus position, under my sheets, dreaming of Raffi.  I wanted to have this warm feeling back again.

It was a start, just a start of a long journey of crushes.   Some of the crushes became love, and a big love became a marriage.  Love became real.

The intensity of young loves and crushes faded as years went by, fortunately, because it started to happen to me every other months, and everywhere.  But Love is always present in my life.

Love makes you alive, makes you sparkle with joy, makes you divine and spiritual.  It makes you go through feelings you will never experience without love, like victory, glory, but sometimes defeat, loss and abandonment.

Love is real but it exists only in our head, and for as long as we want it to last.  Love is experienced by all of us, and still the object of so many experimental science.  Why do we fall in love?  Why do we love this person in particular?   Why do we fall out of love?  Why do we fall in love with a person who doesn’t love us?  What chemistry has to do with it?  Why do we love some one who is just like us?  Or a foreigner who is the complete opposite of us?

After Valentine’s day, last week, now they came up with Crush Day.  Single people with no partners or no one to love or to love them, just survived an emotionally exhausting week-end.  They are secretly hoping that this Crush Day will disappear, and that it will not be celebrated, ever…until they find love.

Be patient, and stay in love.