First Crush

Did I have a first crush? How do we define these things?

In high school, when I started to feel attracted to male bodies, I didn't let myself have crushes on the owners of those bodies. I practiced what I've written about "How to Bust a Crush." 

In first grade, though, because other people hadn't started yet to ask annoying questions about whether I had any particular feelings about boys yet, I was free to notice that a young man I saw every day had the Perfect Face. He drove the bus one of my little "friends" rode to school, was another one's uncle, and was also one of my second cousins once removed, so he was even hired to do a few odd jobs for my parents. 

I didn't think he was a perfect person, and I had no idea why pop culture insisted that women and girls were supposed to look for the perfect male face. I preferred stories where girls looked for treasure, or trained their own horses, or had whatever other adventures, on their own. But I'd found the Perfect Face. What a young man is supposed to look like is what my Cousin John Doe looked like in his early twenties.

That was about as far as it went. I remember making up a few stories that called for a leading man--not that, at that age, I was telling these stories to anyone or writing them down--and thinking that of course the handsome hero looked like John Doe. But more often the stories I made up were about women, or, if they were about animals, they were about "girl" animals.

John Doe was still growing, in his early twenties, only a little less conspicuously than I was between ages five and ten. After I was about ten I didn't think his face was perfect, or even closer to perfect than the other cousins' faces, any more. I didn't like him better than, or as well as, most of the other relatives either. If I wanted to see "one of those Does" it would have been the niece, who was in some of my classes at school and was about as close to being a friend as any of the other kids adults called my friends.

Did I learn anything from this "first crush," if it counts as a crush? I learned that, to my eyes, the perfect face is not typically White nor typically Cherokee, but distinctly biracial. 

Much later I remarked casually to one of my sisters that some other face looked almost like the Perfect Face, and she said--I didn't see it myself--"He looks like you." 

Nonsense, of course. The Perfect Face has copper-toned skin. I have sallow skin.