There are different ways to disappear. Diminishing to nothing and expanding to everything can end the same. I love my visual migraines, the visual part alone. I love the first moment I notice something’s off, before it’s even really quite there – just a shadow of a shimmer. Then the glimmering semi-circle of flashing colors that grows steadily, slowly, expanding into a wider and wider arc. And finally, the best moment – when it’s almost gone, almost, just a faint flickering in the very corner of my vision, and then, in one instant, I blink, and it’s gone.

Some things vanish that way, I think. They don’t simply switch off, or shrink down to nothing. They expand until they’re outside our field of vision, too big for us to see anymore.

I say “some things.” But I’m thinking of crushes I’ve had. I’m thinking how some of them fade gradually, falling farther and farther into memory until one day I realize they reside only there. And how some of them vanish like people in the movies we used to make at holiday camp, when we’d stop the camera, the person would scamper away, and we’d start filming again. Poof, gone, with no harbinger of the change. And how some, the rare ones, just keep growing, and growing, until it’s not a crush anymore, until I blink and the anxiety, frustration, obsession is gone. This happened once, and I felt a pang of loss. Will it come back? I wondered. My mom predicted not. If it comes back, she said, it will come back as love.

I wonder how many times I’ve been in love. It depends, of course, on what you decide that means. Sometimes I think it’s only once, there’s only one that gets to count. Sometimes I go as high as four. The correct answer might be two. If you expand the definition of love to include all intense crushes it shoots up to something like eight.*

It’s like Budapest, I think. I become infatuated with songs, with records, like people. I spend weeks, months, willing to hear nothing but certain music. But there are some songs, no matter what my current music crush is, that rise above everything, that fill me with a conviction every time I hear them that this is it, there’s no such thing as something better than this. Right now I don’t want to hear Budapest. I don’t want to hear Misery. I want to play my new BUMP OF CHICKEN record over, and over, and over, and each time the moments roll around that I especially love my heart races and I catch my breath and sigh. But that feeling exists in time, subject to changing as time flows on. Some songs transcend that. Is that like love? I don’t know. If so, what fills the role of the new records, of that rush of satisfaction that comes from getting to know new music? What if I want both?

They’re not specifically relevant, but let’s have lyrics from Budapest.

I thought I saw her at the late-night restaurant;
She would have sent blue shivers down the wall.
Yeah but she didn’t grace our table,
In fact she wasn’t there at all.
And her legs went on forever,
Like staring up at infinity.
Her heart was spinning to the west lands,
And she didn’t care to be,
That night in Budapest...


*Geeky footnote: It seems there’s something logarithmic going on here, like if we have numbered definitions of Love that get more and more inclusive, the number of people included in them grows exponentially with base 2. Hmm, this clearly warrants further study. Perhaps people can be grouped according to the type of growth of this function. Or perhaps it’s always exponential and people are distinguished by the base.