1To call what I am feeling a 'crush' feels inexact. It is not puppy love. It is not new relationship energy. It is not lust. It is an uncontrollable romantic desire.It is not grounded in our friendship or my attraction to her. It is more of an obsession. A desperate need for her to feel the same way about me. A craving. A pang. A wildness of the heart that is as frightening as it is pleasant.It is an unmoored, unmooring thing, drawing me ever upwards in lazy, undirected arcs almost - almost - against my will, ever closer to the sun.

Six tales of love. Six tales of need, of desire, of how to live with the ones you cannot live without. Sawtooth may be a nothing town in a flyover state, but those that live there are no less real for it. They bear all the same emotions as anyone else, have all the same needs.