16 Lesser-Known Ways To Handle A Crush

1. Calm your fucking jorts. This is normal. You are a warm-blooded land mammal, and you are alive and ripping apart polysaccharides and grocery shopping in your favorite underwear secretly hoping to see your crush next to the omega-3 eggs, perhaps bending down to get said eggs so you can glimpse the top of their favorite underwear and also know they are nutritionally intelligent and this is so totally normal.

2. Remind yourself what a crush actually is: an intense desire to literally crush someone until they become a kind of schmear that can be rubbed on every surface of your home and body and also eaten with bagels or toast or those little crackers that look like toast.

3. Call them, maybe.

4. Chill your crush to their Curie point until they become a solid. Put them in a KitchenAid Speed Diamond blender. Grind them to a fine powder. Make a line on top of your toilet tank and inhale through a crisp $20 bill.

5. Ignore them. Wonder why they don’t notice you ignoring them.

6. Get very small and walk into their mouth. Make a home in the space between their left bicuspid and first molar. Live on the scraps of food that fall between their teeth, and read them little folktales and haikus. Grow old, and on the last day of your life read Aesop’s “The Old Man and Death” aloud, in a weary but still generous voice. When you die, let them swallow you until you’ve been incorporated into their body and turned into glucose. They won’t really notice any of this, but they will feel a slight vibration between two of their teeth for several years.

7. Google them. Grow a Google tree in your heart with everything you learn about their elementary school mascot and what they ate in Barcelona that one time in 2006.

8. Make a miniature replica of your crush using pipe cleaners, Popsicle sticks, twine, and googly eyes.

9. Take a nap.

10. Write some faux self-help that is clearly about a specific crush, but is also a kind of general crush on the world (it’s very normal to turn your feelings into unhelpful self-help [it’s also, like, advisable to hide behind second person for a while, until you clear your head {or until your crush becomes more than a crush, which is such a tight ember of possibility you’d never say it aloud}]) and put it on the Internet.

11. Drink some water.

12. Just explode. Explode in a pile of rainbows and jelly beans and rainbow-colored rain and let all your crushes clean you up.

13. Want your crush so hard you develop a clinically debilitating cluster headache. Let the headache have sex with itself until it becomes an army of headaches, and those headaches launch a paramilitary offensive on your self-esteem, which is already decimated, like Vietnam.

14. Write them a fifty-five-billion-word email, which is so big it breaks Gmail and also their heart.

15. Acquire an abandoned storefront. Acquire the municipal permits to coat the walls in lapis lazuli and the floors in butterfly wings. Hire the most beautiful aliens from the nearest life-sustaining supercluster and train them for weeks in how to speak English and deal with gravity and be customer service-minded. Give them each a tiny Post-It that says “I love you.” Throw a party at the abandoned storefront and invite your crush and get the aliens to give each Post-It to your crush one by one, but in a surprise way where they’re hidden in hors d’oeuvres or slipped in pants pockets.

16. Donate your heart to science. Then you won’t feel so much anymore.

This post was originally published at Human Parts on Medium.