A Dream With a Baseball Player, Faye Webster
Dear Reader,
I am dancing as I listen to A dream With A Baseball Player - Faye Webster. It’s an impulse as soon as I hear the steel guitar and the sax oh my god this song is so good. The lyrics too. A light buzzing fills body to its brim. I might burst!
How am I supposed to ever be with him
When he and I don’t speak the same language?
But we have conversations in my head
How did I fall in love with someone I don’t know?
Having a crush: frustratingly hot, all-consuming, butterflies in tummy ouch ouch ouch, mental anguish, usually little to no context. We have all been there. So dancing alone in my room singing this song at the top of my lungs, crush or no crush, I feel my 15-year-old crush-ridden self thanking me:
“YES, that confused, self-loathing yet completely obsessive unwillingness to part from my 18th made-up boyfriend feeling! ITS HORRIBLEEE UGH!!!! The only interaction we’ve had is meager eye contact in the lunch line… but it was sustained eye contact! I swear…”
“You’re welcome,” I murmur, all the while thanking god I’ve matured from the melodrama of my youth. (for the most part).
The way the music roils and cycles with the stress of her words - “how did I fall in love with someone” is very shoulder shake worthy.
There’s so much going on
My grandmothers dead
And I can’t sleep because this isn’t my bed
And he doesn’t even know those things exist
How did I fall in love with someone I don’t know?
I love when a song captures a feeling midair, before the thought has had time to settle. The effect is immediate: I am teleported from my room in Charlottesville to a restless night in my childhood bed, the face of my newest crush transplanted into whatever romance plot fits the scene. Despite everything (tests looming, angst, family illness and disfunction), the elusive crush has become paramount. Stolen kisses and late night phone calls — imagined, of course — fill every waking space. Crushes, at their best, are a blossoming of new love, the harmless imaginings spurred by naive hope that a boy you barely know could be “the one.”
At their worst, crushes are unwieldy, attention-seeking tyrants, delectably parasitic in their insistence to remodel your brain into an altar for the man of the hour (and whatever traits your foolish mind assigns him). Either way, expect your crush to infiltrate its way into your day, your job, your schoolwork, your dreams, and eventually your sanity.
And yet, they are oh so fun, and we go back for more.
Perhaps indulging in “love” from the safety of our own minds allows for greater patience when our real-life romantic pursuits go awry, as they so often do. Or perhaps women are conditioned from birth to crave male attention above all else. Or perhaps crushes are merely an expression of our eagerness to show affection, a symptom of our youth and inexperience. All of the above? Most definitely. Although I wouldn’t wish some of the crushes I’ve had on my worst enemy, they’re a character building kind of torture. And again, sooo fun. Thanks Faye. You get it.