My First Time: Story One

Never confuse the truth with the real.  This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately.  When I was 17 I became friends with Aly.  I was immediately so so so smitten.  We ended up hanging out everyday nearly at once.  I helped her with her homework(even though I wasn't doing my own), listened to music, chatted all night on instant message, and stayed up for hours talking on the land line.  I usually find that if I have a 2 hour or more phone conversation with someone soon after meeting them, I fall in love, and this was the first time. I hadn't really dated anyone else before.  I had been on a few dates, made out with a few girls, but that was about the extent of it.  At an early age, I knew I wanted something serious.  I remember desiring the pain and agony of love and I dreamt of experiencing it firsthand and finally relating to the song lyrics I loved but didn't understand for myself.  Well, as is often the case in life, you get what you want.  We had a tumultuous beginning, being just friends for months, with a few big fights and separations, some classic high school love pain...including a New Years where I thought we were going to kiss.  She had ended a separation of friendship by gifting me with a collage of pictures and inside jokes given to me by a friend of hers and a long phone call while she was on a soccer trip to Florida.  After a month of not seeing her I went to a party(which was rare for me) and was mostly ignored by her.  Just before midnight I madly searched the party for her and as the clock struck a new minute, a new hour, a new day, a new year...I saw her making out with someone else through the sliding glass door outside the kitchen.  I was crushed, defeated, the lowest moment of love I had experienced.  Eventually, we went on a date on Valentines Day and kissed for the first time.  That kiss, that night, was the high point of my young life.  We began dating and immediately were doing the childhood everything but sex hookup, with oral sex, and hands, but no penetration.  She was religious, and waiting for marriage.  I was so ecstatic just to be spending time with her that it didn't matter, at all.  I would have dated her for years without sex, at the time I probably would have said forever.

     Three months into dating we were fooling around in my bedroom at my parents house.  We were naked and Aly was doing what normally happened, which was playing at having sex, getting close, and having me stop her from escalating it.  I struggle to remember my sex with her.  Often times, my sexual memory is almost nonexistent, and almost never attached to deep feelings or desires.  I remember months later and for the next several years spending a lot of time wondering if I was gay without exploring that.  I surmised that I was either too repressed to access that desire, or I just wasn't gay.  I'm honestly still not sure 18 years later.  I can remember Aly's legs, smooth and hairless, sliding across my own, her sitting on my lap, feeling like I was the luckiest person on the whole fucking planet.  This time, I didn't stop her.  I was lying on my back and she sat on top of me, with me sliding into her, for about 10 seconds.  I was racked with guilt and unsure, because even though she initiated it I was worried she didn't want it.  I remember lifting her off me, putting her down on the bed.  She laid on her back, naked.  I kneeled next to her.  "Aly, we aren't virgins anymore," I said and followed with some joke I can't remember trying to lighten the mood.  I felt like I had never witnessed a person so vulnerable.  I felt like her whole life was in my hands.  I felt like I could crush her or soothe her, powerful, but I felt no comfort or joy in that power.  I didn't think I knew myself well enough to weird it.  I didn't trust myself.  I was a violent child.  I am a violent man.  I imagine violence, imagine my revenge, and rarely enact it.  I often feel like a dragon, or a monster, that is on the team of the person I am with, their friendly monster.  I looked her tear strewn face in the eyes and said, "it's ok Aly, I love you."  There it was, the first time I had said that to another person, outside of my family, in my life.  The first time it felt like a choice, the first time it felt heavy and loud and full and chaotic and so much more than I can handle or even wrap any conception around.  I have no idea what came after.  I think we laid there, with me holding her.  I can imagine her head on my chest.  I was so much smaller then, but I still had a chest capable of the physical support that was needed by her.  I felt so incredibly distant from her.  I couldn't understand what she was going through.  It was so simple for me, I loved her madly, deeply...nothing we did together out of joy could be "bad."  I was so confused and trying so hard to reach out to her, and failing.  The weight I felt on my shoulders, I felt I wasn't entitled to an experience, that my feelings were insignificant to match the caliber of her experience.  So, instead of searching my own feelings and sharing them, I made the entire night and all of our future sex about her.  I felt like a caretaker, even though I know I wasn't.  I lacked presence that night, and for all the days and nights of sex that soon followed.  How did she wear her hair? I don't know? It's funny I think of her hair before my own, because I can't remember mine either, though I think it was short.  I miss her in this moment.  I wish I could talk with her about this, get her perspective, which is funny because I am still searching for my own.

    What did her lips taste like on mine?  All I remember is feeling like for 3 months I was electricity itself.  Every time we touched or were close I felt lit up, dangerously so.  I felt I was burning too bright.  As soon as we had sex, I don't remember that feeling.  I felt like I grew up in that evening.  I felt like I became jaded in that evening.  I feel like that evening still defines me.  I don't remember feeling sad, though.  I remember not feeling.  I remember pushing my feelings down so far that I still struggle to search for them and rarely dig one up.