By M.M. Kaufman
It was my last year of college and there was not one person on that campus that was not in love with Georgia at first sight.
I could tell you about her never-been-dyed blonde hair, thick and straight like dried hay that catches the sun. Do you want to hear about her button nose or her slow, loping gait, or maybe her thin, flat frame that made me think of a sexy paper doll come to life? Would you like to hear about her freckles? Because more than a decade later, I still love thinking about them.
I could tell you more about her. What she studied. Her life goals. Her background. Her hobbies. But do I need to? All you need to know is that I was crushed in her presence like you are at eight or fourteen or twenty-two or forty-five. I hope we never lose the ability to be halted and held by beauty.
But let’s go to that drunken night in 2011. American Apparel had college-age women’s fashion in a goddamn chokehold. For the party that night on our small but magical women’s college campus, I wore a matching navy set of American Apparel lingerie and nothing else. I layered the lacy high-waisted panties over the thong because I was going for a slutty Zooey Deschanel meets Mad Men meets some sad, flat female character in a Tao Lin novel. We were all in costumes that night rather than traditional party outfits. Maybe it was some kind of spirit week? Georgia wore tight black jeans, a black v-neck tee, and a black eye-mask and big brimmed hat à la Zorro. The all-black set off her Midwest tan and blonde hair and the effect was nothing short of bewitching. She was sweet and approachable, but her beauty and the all-black was intimidating. Looking at her that night, I felt like I’d been lit on fire.
Youth was a part of it. Cusp of graduation and adulthood was a part of it. But I think the hopeful anything-can-happen-tonight buzz I felt as I chased her around the campus-wide party can be felt at any age. The rest of the parts were alcohol.
We’d all made it to the campus hub—an overly bright building with open staircases and tall windows. My drunk ass was fumbling around on heeled booties as I drooled after Georgia. Hindsight cannot tell me if Georgia ever knew about my feelings for her. She was so even- keeled, so go-with-the-flow, I had never seen any emotion affect her. I’ll never know if she had any idea that we were all in love with her. I wouldn’t have put it past her to have known and not said anything to save us the embarrassment. She was kind down to her thin, sexy little bones and completely without airs. I need you to know this about her because of what happens next.
Georgia, maybe riding that same hopeful high of anything-could-happen-tonight, plucked a fire extinguisher from the wall and—overcome with giggles—mumbled something like, “I wonder how this works.”
I was drenched in a foamy white spray, from my big Zooey Deschanel bangs down to my sexy librarian booties.
I laughed it off. We carried on. The night continued in common college party fashion. Our lives continued in common well-adjusted women fashion.
But we’re not ending the story here. Because the story actually ends here, more than ten years later, when I realize that a crush is not just a figurative term for how pining after someone makes you feel. It also means the object of desire in question, my Georgia, was crushed too. She was crushed into something flat and one-dimensional, like a sexy paper doll. I had a feeling that simile was going to bite me in the ass.
By crushing, yearning, pining, fantasizing about fucking freckles, I didn’t know one real thing about her. I got what I deserved—a face full of dousing chemical spray—not for liking a girl, not for being too cowardly to voice my feelings, but for seeing her as nothing more than something I wanted. So really, who extinguished who?
M.M. Kaufman is a writer based in Georgia. She is a Fulbright Scholar and earned an MFA in the University of New Orleans’ Creative Writing Workshop. She is currently the Managing Editor at Rejection Letters and team member for Micro Podcast. Her fiction is published with The Normal School, Hobart, Metonym Journal, Sundog Lit, Daily Drunk Mag, (mac)ro(mic), HAD, Olney Magazine, Pine Hills Review, Maudlin House, jmww, Major 7th Magazine, Rejection Letters, JAKE, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @mm_kaufman and on her website mmkaufman.com.