First Kiss…*

I remember anniversaries of events very easily.  They just seem to stick to the inside of my head, without me being able to do anything about it.  Perhaps it has something to do with my incessant fixation with numbers, or perhaps my morbid vigilance of time passing by.  An advantage is that I’m great at remembering birthdays; a disadvantage is that I just as easily remember death anniversaries, or anniversaries of traumatic events.  January 25th, 1997 was not a traumatic day– parts of it were pretty nice.  Upon reflection, it taught me a couple of things about myself that I had not previously been aware of:  that I could be loved romantically, and that my heart could be a cold cruel place.  January 25th, this year, is the 17th anniversary of my first kiss.  I wrote a little bit about it a while back on here, but thought I’d flesh out the day more, as I never have in writing.
 
My first kiss almost occurred when I was eight years old, in third grade, my hair in long curly pigtails.  This tall awkward boy in my class with these big wet lips, David I think his name was, told me he liked me and then chased me around the playground for an entire recess trying to kiss me.  Looking back, I am laughing, of course, but at the time, I remember being absolutely horrified, climbing from one high surface to another, frantically seeking shelter behind groups of friends, but he was a much faster runner than I was and an absolutely simian climber, and easily caught up to me.  I narrowly slipped away each time, but on his last try, he got me pinned to the metal climbing dome and I screamed with terror as I saw those huge wet puffy fish-lips of his above coming down on my face.  I managed to cover my mouth with my arms, but felt his sloppy liquidy smooch overtake my cheek, and then a teacher on recess duty pulled him off of me.  My scream must have alerted the teacher, haha.  Overall, he was a pretty nice kid.
 
Between the ages of 12 and 14, I had a few ongoing flirtations, boys calling me up and trying to act really smooth, telling me a few of the dirty things they wanted to do to me, which I don’t think they’d ever done with anyone, but I had a whole world of problems I was dealing with through that time, so I never actually got around to any dates or romantic rendezvous.  
 
I had just entered a new school when I was 15 and didn’t really have any crushes.  From about October 1996, various acquaintances kept hinting to me that someone from the school had a crush on me.  Several of them worded it that he was enchanted with me.  This intrigued me, as I figured he must have worded it that way initially, and the term enchanted suggested a rather romantic kind of soul, but when I’d ask who it was, no one would tell me.  The vague hints continued for a couple of months, until I was back to school after Christmas break, and my good friend Julian caved after much begging on my part, and revealed the mystery man’s identity.
 
He was a very tall goth kid, broad shouldered, with long stringy black hair, huge dark bulging-out eyes, a slightly chubby body, always wore a black trench coat.  I’d never met him, but occasionally caught a glimpse of him as I stepped off of my school bus in the mornings.  His name was Xavier.  I wasn’t really physically attracted to him, but he did seem to have a certain dark magnetism about him, which is something that’s always drawn me.  I had told myself I would give whoever the boy turned out to be a genuine chance, so that’s what I set out to do.
 
I hadn’t figured out what to say to him, and was as usual, kind of in my own little world, so I just went about my business for the next few days.  I don’t know if word spread to him that I’d been told or if he’d just independently decided to go for it, but one afternoon I was sitting in the library by myself during my lunch period and I noticed him walking by in the hallway, on the other side of the glass wall next to me, and I looked up and he took off his mirrored aviator sunglasses and stared directly at me and smiled.  He turned the corner and veered into the library and walked over to me, introduced himself, and sat down.  I remember I was wearing this periwinkle maxi skirt with large pastel blossoms printed on it, made of a very crisp yet very stretchy material that gave me the appearance of having hips even though I really didn’t have them yet, and a baby blue stretchy t-shirt, similar crisp material, with tiny yellow stenciled daisies printed all over it and a yellow zipper at the top, which was always down.  
 
He was wearing his black trench coat, of course, hanging casually open like it always was, faded black jeans and a black graphic shirt underneath.  He sat down next to me and half-smiled, widened his eyes at me like he was trying to fully take me in, and told me he’d seen me around a lot, and had always wanted to talk to me.  I was stunned at his candidness.  There was a certain poetic quality about his eyes, a depth and a hint of sadness, and even though they weren’t pretty, I still liked them.  I think after drinking in his words, I told him I’d been wanting to talk to him also.  He folded his arms behind his head and leaned back in his chair, and we had a lovely conversation.  I don’t remember what we talked about, but I remember that at the end of it, he asked for my phone number, and I wrote it in my notebook and tore that part of the page out for him.  He took it and smiled, coolly folded it up and put it in his pocket, and strode off.
 
He called me a couple of nights later, while I was listening to The Smashing Pumpkins album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness in my bedroom with all the lights off, and we talked for a couple of hours and it felt very intimate.  He told me he liked listening to my voice, and I had to admit I enjoyed his voice too.  It was sort of deep but very soft.  He called me every couple of nights for about two weeks.  The only troubling thing was that when I’d see him in person at school, I really didn’t feel attracted to him.  I appreciated his eyes, but somehow, it wasn’t enough…there was just no physical desire in me.  I told myself it didn’t matter, because I genuinely enjoyed talking to him and liked him as a person.  I wanted to be physically attracted to him, and thought that maybe with a little more time, I might be.
 
We made plans for a date one Saturday, January 25th.  He came by my house in the afternoon after he was finished at Saturday detention.  I was listening to Joan Osborne’s cover of “The Man in the Long Black Coat” as I got myself ready, kind of nervous because I’d never hung out with a boy outside school like that before.  Put on some very 90s looking stonewashed button-fly jeans and a red and black striped crop top with long sleeves and mother-of-pearl buttons down the front, and the first lipstick I ever owned, a shade called Guava Stain from Clinique, basically a sheen that deepened the natural color of my lips a bit and somehow highlighted a natural glow from the rest of my face.
 
My grandmother let Xavier in and frowned at him a bit.  He was dressed like the song I was listening to, naturally, so there was no way she could approve.  He tried to win points with her by complimenting her house and telling her it looked like a cathedral.  With its high ceilings and plethora of Catholic images all over the walls, I could see that.  We walked outside and the air was unusually chilly for late January in South Texas– maybe 58 degrees.  I was a little bit cold in my crop top, but kind of enjoyed the sensation.  There’s a natural romantic feeling to me about walking long distances outside while just a little bit cold.  The sky was overcast and pale, and that made it even more romantic.  We walked shyly together and enjoyed the air and the freedom and ended up taking a roundabout path to the mall.  Entered and roamed around a bit.  He stopped and looked through the belt buckles at this cheap jewelry kiosk, and saw me looking at the cheap little rings.  He told me he’d wanted to buy me something for the longest time, which freaked me out a little bit, since I’d only known him for two, at most three weeks.  I told him it was okay, that he didn’t have to, but he insisted and picked out a tiny silver colored ring with a purple stone in the center and metal flower petals radiating out.  He slid it onto my finger and I had to admit it was very sweet. 

We walked to his best friend’s house after.  I don’t remember the kid’s name, but I remember he was a little Mexican kid with a beard who always seemed stoned.  His sister was very very pretty, and though I’d only seen her around once or twice at school, as we walked by her room she screamed out at me and pulled me into her room and talked to me like I was her new best friend while she finished doing her makeup.  I enjoyed her warmth very much.  Joined Xavier and his friend in the friend’s room and it was littered with food trash and marijuana paraphernalia.  I sat on the floor next to Xavier and he stroked my hand with his fingers as he made fun of his friend in a jovial way.  I’d never had a boy touch my hand extensively.  He kept smiling at me with such appreciation in his eyes, and I felt very self-conscious, kind of uncomfortable, but I tried to just relax and let myself enjoy it.  At one point, Xavier reached over and found a tube of black lipstick on his friend’s dresser, smiled deviously at me, and applied it onto his own lips without a mirror.  I laughed so hard, but kind of liked the way it looked on him, messy as it was.  
 
Xavier and I left his friend’s house about an hour later and took a walk to the park a few blocks from my house.  As we were walking over, he told me he thought I was beautiful, and his words stunned me and made my cheeks turn a little bit red.  No boy had ever told me that in person before.  I’d had a couple of school friends tell me that over the phone, but never face to face or with quite the amount of passion Xavier said it with.  He insisted we stop there on the sidewalk in front of a stranger’s house, and stood behind me and slid his arms tenderly around my shoulders.  I felt his breath in my ear as he very softly uttered, I’ve wanted to do this for so long…  He pressed the side of his face down against mine and I could see out of the corner of my eye that his eyes were closed.  He was savoring the moment and I felt guilty for feeling kind of uncomfortable.  We walked a couple of more blocks and our shadows stretched long and slanted in front of us.  He moaned lightly and I couldn’t believe the lovely thing he said at that moment:  

Even your shadow is beautiful… 

By far the most romantic thing any male had ever said to me.  I stopped walking and his words quivered through my entire body like an echo through a cavern.  I ambled next to him feeling stunned, word-drunk.  The chill in the air enhanced the feeling of every one of my pores standing alert.  
 
We didn’t say anything until we were sitting on a bench in the park.  He traced the side of my cheek very gently with his fingers and told me he loved looking at my face.  I was speechless.  He traced my jawline and lifted his fingers to my lips.  He traced my lips very softly, first the downward arc of my bottom lip, and then the arches of my upper lip, and I still couldn’t say anything.  I was amazed by his adoration and liked the way his touch felt on my skin, but when I looked at his face, at the shape of his lips, at his cheeks, I had no desire to take the physicality any further.  And I felt awful about that.  I tried to just relax and appreciate the moment.  He leaned his face close to mine, and then I saw a look of defeat suddenly in his eyes, and he pulled back a few inches and said, I wish I had the courage of other men. I really do.  I didn’t especially want to kiss him, but I got the idea that he wanted to kiss me, and then I started to wonder, as I often did, what it felt like to be kissed on my lips, as I never had been.  I had wondered for years how it would feel, invested many hours of daydream into the question.  I decided to make it a little easier for him, so I closed my eyes and gently pursed out my lips.  

I wondered if I would feel his against mine, and within seconds, I felt them, large and bold against my own.  They felt like physical objects and nothing more.  Then his tongue made its way on top of mine, and I wasn’t ready for that yet.  It felt like a hard syrupy monster invading my mouth, extremely syrupy.  Something wet touched the top of my chest and I pulled away and looked down, and then up at him, as a very long and thick strand of opaque drool woven with tinges of soft black lipstick was dripping from his mouth.  He saw immediately, laughed, and apologized.  Said he must have gotten too excited.  He wiped it off his own mouth with his hand and then tried to get it off me.  I dug for a tissue in my purse and handed him one.  Some of it had stuck to my neck, so he cleaned that off, wiped off my upper chest, above the neckline of my blouse, and said he was kind of glad he had drooled, as he was enjoying cleaning it off of me.  (I probably wouldn’t have cared at all about the drool if I’d been physically attracted to him.  May have even taken it as a compliment.)  I realized that his black lipstick had probably also smeared all around my lips and asked him how much it had.  He smiled and said it was all over the lower half of my face.  He wiped off his lipstick from my face and then put the tissue in his pocket and told me there was still a little bit leftover that he couldonly get with his hands.  He flashed a huge smile and ran his fingers all over my lips again, and above and below them, and admitted that it had all been gone for a while, that he was just enjoying stroking my face.  I smiled and tried again to just relax into the affection.  Shortly thereafter, I realized it was dark outside already and my grandmother would be expecting me home.  He walked me home and I hugged him briefly and ran into my house.  He looked like he felt on top of the world and I felt like mud on the bottom of someone’s shoe.  I just wanted to be alone.
 
I thought of all the gorgeous things he’d said, and they touched my heart deeply and I truly treasured them, and him, but I just didn’t want to do anything like that with him again.  By allowing him to kiss me and tolerating all of his sweetness, I was really just using him for one of my experiments.  Gathering data from real life experiences.  I felt like a terrible person, and I didn’t know what to do, as I didn’t want to hurt him.  I also felt like a shallow person for not being able to get past the fact that I wasn’t physically attracted to him.  I liked him emotionally and intellectually, so I wondered why I couldn’t just channel that for physical desire.
 
He lifted me up in the air by my ribs when he saw me at school that Monday morning, hugged me very tightly and whispered in my ear, And I’m not letting go.  He called me a few times that week, and I tried to just be nice and not lead him on further.  I don’t know what I expected, that the whole thing would just melt away?  That the predicament would just dissipate and he’d never call me out on it?  I think that is what I’d hoped for.  Late in the week, during one of our phone conversations, he asked me what I’d been dreading more than anything– he asked me what our status was, if I was his girlfriend, what he should tell the people who had been asking him…He sounded very enthusiastic when he asked me, like he was just waiting for me to excitedly confirm that of course I was his girlfriend.  I was forced to tell him that I wasn’t comfortable calling myself that.  He sounded crestfallen.  He then asked me if I wanted to continue seeing him.  I stayed silent for a minute, and then said no.  After some silence on his end, he said something artfully tragic, that haunted my thoughts for several years, that I thought would be etched on my brain and conscience forever.  But alas, I’ve forgotten it.

I wish I could say I kept the ring he bought me, that I still have it to this day stored away in a sturdy old box.  But one day in phys ed, a few weeks later, I found it in my backpack and started feeling incredibly guilt-ridden again, so I decided to leave it on a changing bench in the girls’ locker room, and see if it was still there when I returned near the end of class.  Quite predictably, it wasn’t.  Not one of my finer moments.

Fast forward a few years, and he came knocking at my door again, and we had many more lovely conversations.  I eventually gave in and took him on as a friend with benefits, but again, it ended in one of those conversations I hated so much– him asking me to commit and me having to turn him down.  Another tragic comment, and that time, I forgot it right away.

***
She gave her heart to the man in the long black coat…I hesitated to include the song above because even though it was a song I listened to on that day, the whole story was about me not giving my heart to the man in the long black coat.  But then, as I listened to it again, after writing the entry, that lyric took on a different meaning to me.  In a way, I did give him my heart– that is, to the sad image of him impressed upon my guilty conscience.  Because after that experience, I began to believe I didn’t have very much of a heart.