your first kiss, in great detail
I wrote a story on this subject for creative nonfiction class in college. I'm not sure it could get any more "in great detail" than this.
The story of my first kiss is a story that, ironically, manages to be both cliché and completely absurd. I was the Teenage Anygirl, giddy and shy, and he was the brooding Average Joe (yes, I swear, his name really was Joe!), in the Southern Anywhere, USA. Take away the names and faces and details, and you are left with a story you’ve heard a million times before. But some stories are worth telling over and over again-that’s why we have fairy tales. You change a few things, perpetuate myth for all it’s worth, and hopefully you learn a little something. But this story, unlike Snow White or Rumpelstiltskin, is true. Despite is clichés and utter cheesiness, this is My Story, and that is why I’m telling it.
I met Joe in church youth group. Anyone who’s ever been a young Christian can tell you that youth groups are nothing if not hotbeds of teen lust.
I was in eighth grade. He was all the way in high school-a freshman-one year is a big deal when it bridges the great divide between middle school and high school. He was the mostly quiet, shaggy-haired, leans-great, lost puppy, Jordan Catalano type-who could blame me for spending long hours analyzing every word that came out of his mouth?
When I myself stepped over the border into high school, everything on Earth shifted to accommodate the change-and Joe’s role in my life slowly began to evolve from “at-a-distance object of fascination” to something resembling “friend.”
Flirtation oozed from his pores, in the direction of any female in a five-male radius, making it extremely difficult to determine whether or not I was anybody special. Somehow I became the girl he turned to every time he wanted to know, “Does she like me?” He asked this question often, and the answer was consistently no. I had a nearly irrepressible urge to get in his face and shriek at the top of my lungs until he realized who actually did like him.
On December fourth, in the church parking lot after youth group, mid-point my freshman year, a pivotal moment in time-he finally asked the question I had been simultaneously longing for and dreading: “Do you like me?”
Had I been the brave woman I’ve always wanted to be, things would have progressed in a definite direction from that moment on. Instead, I choked on the word “maybe” and demanded to know why he was asking. He tried to shirk away, so I did what any responsible lovelorn fourteen-year-old girl would do: I grabbed the lapels of his leather jacket and looked hard and fast into his taunting eyes. He glanced over my shoulder and told me that my parents had pulled up. Oh, the humiliation of those years just prior to the driver’s license! I demanded closure, he smirked and pulled out of my grasp, leaving me open and desperate, not to mention forced to deal with my parents’ questions.
An open and exposed wound, I avoided him for months. Then, one fateful March day in the high school gym, he un-did my little fantasy world (in which he pined for me) and reduced me to a crying, Alanis-Morissette-blasting angst-ridden mess.
“You have a girlfriend? Since when?”
“Since a month ago.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why would I tell you?” (ouch)
“Because! Because-who is she?”
**name omitted to protect an innocent girl whom I could have clawed to death**
“What, do you not like her?” he spat, taking in my pained expression.
“WELL, NOW I DON’T!” I exploded, and stormed off in a haughty attempt to save my dignity by not hearing the response.
Fast-forward to April Fool’s Day. While getting dressed that morning, I asked myself, “What must I be on the lookout for today?” It fleetingly occurred to me how horrible it would be if Joe were to fool me into believing that he and Girl had broken up.
Sure enough (and I swear this is 100% nonfiction), he dropped that very bombshell that afternoon. Approximately fifteen minutes later, he managed to break through my defenses and my insistence that he was lying. Apparently, his newfound singledom was a good reason to interrogate me about all my feelings and intentions, which he had apparently been wondering about for four months. Unfortunately for him, in that four months, I had buried all my feelings and intentions as deep inside me as they could go, beneath my humiliation and self-protection.
That night I received a phone call from him, the first ever, and if I hadn’t been thoroughly confused as to where things were heading and what his intentions were, my heart would have stood on tiptoe and yodeled out of pure joy.
The conversation jerked around in about fifty million directions before he pulled it firmly in the direction of December fourth. To my amazement, he seemed to have put a lot of thought into that night. He drew a comparison to Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting at the Capulets’ party-a comparison that makes absolutely no sense in retrospect. I’m sure it didn’t make sense at the time either, I just didn’t take the time to look into it because I couldn’t see past the unbelievable charm inherent in the fact that he drew the comparison at all.
“I’ve always wondered what would have happened if your parents hadn’t shown up,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you think I mean?”
“What would have-what could have happened?”
“What do you think?”
This cat-and-mouse game went on for a while before I exploded, “After everything that you’ve made me tell you, can’t you tell me something?”
Apparently my point sunk in, a miracle I have not seen duplicated before or since. He inhaled, and responded in one quick breath, “I might have kissed you.”
I don’t remember much about the rest of that phone conversation, except that I hung up with my head spinning and my heart racing, and that I went through the next day of school without learning a blessed thing.
He showed up at youth group the following night: Wednesday, April 2nd, 1997, a date permanently embedded in my memory. I rejoiced at the likely possibility that he was there because of me. My womanly intuition was working overtime, and I knew that This Was The Night. So I leaned back and prepared to enjoy the ride
…until youth group was over and everyone filtered out. There we were alone, fourteen and sixteen, with a thousand un-said things floating between us, and just maybe, one common goal? Time stretched on, and I grew impatient. It never even occurred to me to make the first move. Although I did try the old “your hand is really big” trick. I held my hand up against his, and he intertwined our fingers with one quick motion.
“Is this what you wanted?” he asked softly.
“No.” I shot back, reflexively. Offended, he snatched his hand back, and all I could think was I am the world’s biggest moron.
Unexpectedly, perhaps out of urgency and/or frustration, he kissed my nose. I stared at him in complete and utter confusion, unable to decode such a gesture. Kiss on cheek=friend, kiss on forehead=big brother, kiss on mouth=love, kiss on hand= “charmed I’m sure”-but WHAT IS A KISS ON THE NOSE? I still have not figured this one out.
My response was something to the effect of a half-hearted “Don’t…” which prompted him to ask me, “Well, where do you want me to kiss you?”
Okay, I was fourteen and head over heels in… something… with this guy, and he was asking me where I wanted him to kiss me. Not IF, not WHEN, but WHERE. My breathing stopped and my mind went blank-there could be no proper way to answer this question without losing every ounce of dignity and familiarity in life as I knew it and being flung head-first into the realm of… people who had been kissed. Either that, or thrown out to the wolves on my ass, doomed to a lifetime of humiliation. I continued to stare at him the way I might stare at Lucille Ball if she came back from the dead to peddle Vitameatavegamin at my doorstep. I mean, WHAT?
“Come here,” he urged, making his intentions clear. If this happened today (I hope) I would smile seductively and answer the call. But I was fourteen, had never been kissed, and was sitting in a church lounge of all places. God himself may well have been looking over my shoulder-and was probably laughing at me for being so stupid! I was trying to comprehend that if I leaned forward, I would be facing the reality of something I had dreamed about for as long as I could remember. It was a lot of pressure to put on a person.
Before I could devise a short-term plan of action, Joe gave up on me and leaned in. It was quick and clumsy, and I didn’t kiss back. It was over almost as soon as it began. I had to push away the niggling thought that screamed in dismay, “That was IT?” About ten minutes went by with me in stupor trying to decode the events of the evening and being unable to accept what had just happened as my first kiss. I looked at him, scrutinizing and analyzing as usual, hoping that some body language or expression, some little clue in some small part of his being, would tell me what was going on, what direction my life was headed in, what his heart was saying about me, what in the god-forsaken world did he want from me, and why were we sitting here in silence?
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked, in an unnecessarily accusatory tone.
“Because I don’t know what just happened,” I answered truthfully.
“What, you want another one?”
See, had this been fiction, he would have said something much more eloquent like, “You’re confused? Let me clarify.” Or, “My lips, two blushing pilgrims ready stand, to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.” (Hey, he drew the Romeo and Juliet correlation first, I didn’t.) But, he didn’t say those things. He said, “What, you want another one?” and leaned in again. This second kiss lasted approximately four seconds, during which my thought process went Okay, second chance, I can do this, just lean up, kiss back, not so hard, this is not algebra, this is real life, okay. [insert his tongue into my mouth] BACK UP ABORT MISSION I CAN NOT DO THIS. I broke the kiss. “Don’t stick your tongue in my mouth, dammit, it’s my first kiss!” I exclaimed without thinking.
“Sorry…” he murmured, then caught himself. “Actually, it’s your second.”
“Yeah, well, the first one didn’t count,” I retorted nastily. It’s only now, looking back, that it occurs to me, maybe he was new at this too. Maybe my words actually had potential to sting. Maybe his ego only looked inflated because it was in fact fragile-stick a pin in it and, no matter how big and inflated, POP, it’s gone in one quick movement.
I’m ashamed to admit what happened next.
I hyperventilated.
Literally.
Full-force, gasping, wheezing, had to get a paper bag from the church kitchen hyperventilated. The comment from Joe, which I have never quite recovered from the sting of, was “See, this is why I didn’t want to do this.” And my current boyfriend wonders why I think he’ll get sick of my emotional roller coaster!
From the casual observer’s point of view, it might look as if things were finally beginning between Joe and me. But the casual observer is dead wrong-the relationship never was, and as the Friends theme song says, my love life was D.O.A. A week later, I found out that Joe had a date with a girl from my drama class. I wrote him a note, in which I said “You’re probably going to tell me that we’re just friends, aren’t you? Well, I don’t see you sticking your tongue in Brad’s mouth.” I’m still rather proud of that. I developed a backbone; it just took me a while.
I can’t say that I really blame him, hyperventilation and all, but at the time I felt… well, used and cast aside, as I most certainly was. So, maybe no one is really to blame. If this happened today-well, it wouldn’t. I am proud to say I have not hyperventilated over a kiss any time since. It was over a year before I kissed again and learned what real heartbreak is.
I have no idea where Joe is today. The last concrete memory I have of him is noticing him at my senior prom and wondering who he was there with. Our eyes somehow met across the dance floor, over a crowd of formally dressed dry-humpers. I saw him noticing me, and I smiled. Really smiled, ear-to-ear, sparkly-eyed, and sincere. I hope he saw in that smile, I hold nothing against you, we have survived our separate journeys through high school, and I wish you well. Maybe he did understand my smile, because he returned it.
The story of my first kiss is a story that, ironically, manages to be both cliché and completely absurd. I was the Teenage Anygirl, giddy and shy, and he was the brooding Average Joe (yes, I swear, his name really was Joe!), in the Southern Anywhere, USA. Take away the names and faces and details, and you are left with a story you’ve heard a million times before. But some stories are worth telling over and over again-that’s why we have fairy tales. You change a few things, perpetuate myth for all it’s worth, and hopefully you learn a little something. But this story, unlike Snow White or Rumpelstiltskin, is true. Despite is clichés and utter cheesiness, this is My Story, and that is why I’m telling it.
I met Joe in church youth group. Anyone who’s ever been a young Christian can tell you that youth groups are nothing if not hotbeds of teen lust.
I was in eighth grade. He was all the way in high school-a freshman-one year is a big deal when it bridges the great divide between middle school and high school. He was the mostly quiet, shaggy-haired, leans-great, lost puppy, Jordan Catalano type-who could blame me for spending long hours analyzing every word that came out of his mouth?
When I myself stepped over the border into high school, everything on Earth shifted to accommodate the change-and Joe’s role in my life slowly began to evolve from “at-a-distance object of fascination” to something resembling “friend.”
Flirtation oozed from his pores, in the direction of any female in a five-male radius, making it extremely difficult to determine whether or not I was anybody special. Somehow I became the girl he turned to every time he wanted to know, “Does she like me?” He asked this question often, and the answer was consistently no. I had a nearly irrepressible urge to get in his face and shriek at the top of my lungs until he realized who actually did like him.
On December fourth, in the church parking lot after youth group, mid-point my freshman year, a pivotal moment in time-he finally asked the question I had been simultaneously longing for and dreading: “Do you like me?”
Had I been the brave woman I’ve always wanted to be, things would have progressed in a definite direction from that moment on. Instead, I choked on the word “maybe” and demanded to know why he was asking. He tried to shirk away, so I did what any responsible lovelorn fourteen-year-old girl would do: I grabbed the lapels of his leather jacket and looked hard and fast into his taunting eyes. He glanced over my shoulder and told me that my parents had pulled up. Oh, the humiliation of those years just prior to the driver’s license! I demanded closure, he smirked and pulled out of my grasp, leaving me open and desperate, not to mention forced to deal with my parents’ questions.
An open and exposed wound, I avoided him for months. Then, one fateful March day in the high school gym, he un-did my little fantasy world (in which he pined for me) and reduced me to a crying, Alanis-Morissette-blasting angst-ridden mess.
“You have a girlfriend? Since when?”
“Since a month ago.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why would I tell you?” (ouch)
“Because! Because-who is she?”
**name omitted to protect an innocent girl whom I could have clawed to death**
“What, do you not like her?” he spat, taking in my pained expression.
“WELL, NOW I DON’T!” I exploded, and stormed off in a haughty attempt to save my dignity by not hearing the response.
Fast-forward to April Fool’s Day. While getting dressed that morning, I asked myself, “What must I be on the lookout for today?” It fleetingly occurred to me how horrible it would be if Joe were to fool me into believing that he and Girl had broken up.
Sure enough (and I swear this is 100% nonfiction), he dropped that very bombshell that afternoon. Approximately fifteen minutes later, he managed to break through my defenses and my insistence that he was lying. Apparently, his newfound singledom was a good reason to interrogate me about all my feelings and intentions, which he had apparently been wondering about for four months. Unfortunately for him, in that four months, I had buried all my feelings and intentions as deep inside me as they could go, beneath my humiliation and self-protection.
That night I received a phone call from him, the first ever, and if I hadn’t been thoroughly confused as to where things were heading and what his intentions were, my heart would have stood on tiptoe and yodeled out of pure joy.
The conversation jerked around in about fifty million directions before he pulled it firmly in the direction of December fourth. To my amazement, he seemed to have put a lot of thought into that night. He drew a comparison to Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting at the Capulets’ party-a comparison that makes absolutely no sense in retrospect. I’m sure it didn’t make sense at the time either, I just didn’t take the time to look into it because I couldn’t see past the unbelievable charm inherent in the fact that he drew the comparison at all.
“I’ve always wondered what would have happened if your parents hadn’t shown up,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you think I mean?”
“What would have-what could have happened?”
“What do you think?”
This cat-and-mouse game went on for a while before I exploded, “After everything that you’ve made me tell you, can’t you tell me something?”
Apparently my point sunk in, a miracle I have not seen duplicated before or since. He inhaled, and responded in one quick breath, “I might have kissed you.”
I don’t remember much about the rest of that phone conversation, except that I hung up with my head spinning and my heart racing, and that I went through the next day of school without learning a blessed thing.
He showed up at youth group the following night: Wednesday, April 2nd, 1997, a date permanently embedded in my memory. I rejoiced at the likely possibility that he was there because of me. My womanly intuition was working overtime, and I knew that This Was The Night. So I leaned back and prepared to enjoy the ride
…until youth group was over and everyone filtered out. There we were alone, fourteen and sixteen, with a thousand un-said things floating between us, and just maybe, one common goal? Time stretched on, and I grew impatient. It never even occurred to me to make the first move. Although I did try the old “your hand is really big” trick. I held my hand up against his, and he intertwined our fingers with one quick motion.
“Is this what you wanted?” he asked softly.
“No.” I shot back, reflexively. Offended, he snatched his hand back, and all I could think was I am the world’s biggest moron.
Unexpectedly, perhaps out of urgency and/or frustration, he kissed my nose. I stared at him in complete and utter confusion, unable to decode such a gesture. Kiss on cheek=friend, kiss on forehead=big brother, kiss on mouth=love, kiss on hand= “charmed I’m sure”-but WHAT IS A KISS ON THE NOSE? I still have not figured this one out.
My response was something to the effect of a half-hearted “Don’t…” which prompted him to ask me, “Well, where do you want me to kiss you?”
Okay, I was fourteen and head over heels in… something… with this guy, and he was asking me where I wanted him to kiss me. Not IF, not WHEN, but WHERE. My breathing stopped and my mind went blank-there could be no proper way to answer this question without losing every ounce of dignity and familiarity in life as I knew it and being flung head-first into the realm of… people who had been kissed. Either that, or thrown out to the wolves on my ass, doomed to a lifetime of humiliation. I continued to stare at him the way I might stare at Lucille Ball if she came back from the dead to peddle Vitameatavegamin at my doorstep. I mean, WHAT?
“Come here,” he urged, making his intentions clear. If this happened today (I hope) I would smile seductively and answer the call. But I was fourteen, had never been kissed, and was sitting in a church lounge of all places. God himself may well have been looking over my shoulder-and was probably laughing at me for being so stupid! I was trying to comprehend that if I leaned forward, I would be facing the reality of something I had dreamed about for as long as I could remember. It was a lot of pressure to put on a person.
Before I could devise a short-term plan of action, Joe gave up on me and leaned in. It was quick and clumsy, and I didn’t kiss back. It was over almost as soon as it began. I had to push away the niggling thought that screamed in dismay, “That was IT?” About ten minutes went by with me in stupor trying to decode the events of the evening and being unable to accept what had just happened as my first kiss. I looked at him, scrutinizing and analyzing as usual, hoping that some body language or expression, some little clue in some small part of his being, would tell me what was going on, what direction my life was headed in, what his heart was saying about me, what in the god-forsaken world did he want from me, and why were we sitting here in silence?
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked, in an unnecessarily accusatory tone.
“Because I don’t know what just happened,” I answered truthfully.
“What, you want another one?”
See, had this been fiction, he would have said something much more eloquent like, “You’re confused? Let me clarify.” Or, “My lips, two blushing pilgrims ready stand, to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.” (Hey, he drew the Romeo and Juliet correlation first, I didn’t.) But, he didn’t say those things. He said, “What, you want another one?” and leaned in again. This second kiss lasted approximately four seconds, during which my thought process went Okay, second chance, I can do this, just lean up, kiss back, not so hard, this is not algebra, this is real life, okay. [insert his tongue into my mouth] BACK UP ABORT MISSION I CAN NOT DO THIS. I broke the kiss. “Don’t stick your tongue in my mouth, dammit, it’s my first kiss!” I exclaimed without thinking.
“Sorry…” he murmured, then caught himself. “Actually, it’s your second.”
“Yeah, well, the first one didn’t count,” I retorted nastily. It’s only now, looking back, that it occurs to me, maybe he was new at this too. Maybe my words actually had potential to sting. Maybe his ego only looked inflated because it was in fact fragile-stick a pin in it and, no matter how big and inflated, POP, it’s gone in one quick movement.
I’m ashamed to admit what happened next.
I hyperventilated.
Literally.
Full-force, gasping, wheezing, had to get a paper bag from the church kitchen hyperventilated. The comment from Joe, which I have never quite recovered from the sting of, was “See, this is why I didn’t want to do this.” And my current boyfriend wonders why I think he’ll get sick of my emotional roller coaster!
From the casual observer’s point of view, it might look as if things were finally beginning between Joe and me. But the casual observer is dead wrong-the relationship never was, and as the Friends theme song says, my love life was D.O.A. A week later, I found out that Joe had a date with a girl from my drama class. I wrote him a note, in which I said “You’re probably going to tell me that we’re just friends, aren’t you? Well, I don’t see you sticking your tongue in Brad’s mouth.” I’m still rather proud of that. I developed a backbone; it just took me a while.
I can’t say that I really blame him, hyperventilation and all, but at the time I felt… well, used and cast aside, as I most certainly was. So, maybe no one is really to blame. If this happened today-well, it wouldn’t. I am proud to say I have not hyperventilated over a kiss any time since. It was over a year before I kissed again and learned what real heartbreak is.
I have no idea where Joe is today. The last concrete memory I have of him is noticing him at my senior prom and wondering who he was there with. Our eyes somehow met across the dance floor, over a crowd of formally dressed dry-humpers. I saw him noticing me, and I smiled. Really smiled, ear-to-ear, sparkly-eyed, and sincere. I hope he saw in that smile, I hold nothing against you, we have survived our separate journeys through high school, and I wish you well. Maybe he did understand my smile, because he returned it.