#5 MY FIRST KISS, MY FIRST HEARTBREAK
Why oh why does the intensity of emotion from a fifteen year old girl feel like no other time in her life?
I’d spent my whole freshman year of high school in semi-flirtations with various crushes from the older, cooler, totally off-limits senior boys – especially the ones with girlfriends – to the boys in my class, some single some not. I vaguely remember a scene with two crushes where I was sitting on a swing set in Alapaha after some church event and both boys, jock, muscular types, one with big, bushy curly hair, were standing next to me – we were alone for some reason, everyone else in the former school gymnasium before they’d combined the high schools from Alapaha and Nashville (Georgia) into one.
One of the boys asked me if I’d kissed a boy before. One of them had braces so I lied and said I’d never kissed anyone with braces. The truth was, I’d never kissed anyone, braces or not. I’d happily have kissed either one, although the more popular boy had a prettier blonder thinner girlfriend who went to my church, so that scenario was starting to remind me of the whole Cowboy and Amanda thing (see post four here).
Turns out, I didn’t kiss either one of them that night and never would kiss any of the boys in that friend group. I’m not sure if they’d even wanted to kiss me, but, either way, it didn’t happen. I had this vague impression, though, that everyone had already been kissed and I was late to the party.
When I was a sophomore in high school, I remember spotting this really cute, very tall freshman. I didn’t know he was a freshman at the time, but he was a skater-type boy with blonde floppy hair and blue eyes – the kind of floppy hair that made every girl in teen movies swoon. This was around the time Avril Lavigne’s song came out and that would probably sum up the trajectory of our interactions (if instead of a cool music superstar, he just became a rich businessman instead). Also, equally, I wanted a more preppy-dressing boy but wouldn’t learn for (far too many) years that you cannot dress up boyfriends like dolls and have them morph into what you wanted.
I have no idea how we started talking or how he asked me “out” but we started going out for two very happy (?) weeks – or maybe as my therapist just said last week, we fall into patterns that are comfortable and familiar in relationships. Maybe being blown off and slightly ignored was what I’d grown to expect in my non-dating experience. By that I mean, in one note in our correspondence (teens at the time passed notes in hallways and in classes), I had asked him to go to my aunt and uncle’s wedding with me (Sparky’s brother and his wife, still happily married) and he said he couldn’t blow off his (very pretty) female best friend because he had promised her he’d go to the cinema with her. Sigh! I was disappointed but accepted it.
Cue the crippling jealousy, especially towards thin, pretty blondes (i.e. what I considered the opposite of me). Was this where it all began with my high school crushes (and later my first husband) leaving me for thinner, prettier, blonder women? Add note for next therapy session!
Again, my timelines are fuzzy but we went to the Saturday homecoming dance together. Homecoming is the first dance of the year and is in the fall (around September or October and school starts around August), after an epic [American] Friday night football game.
At many a football game, I saw and spoke to many crushes – I just couldn’t contain myself. I was not so interested in the football part – except maybe the halftime show where the band and colorguard put on a spectacular performance – but mostly the hanging out at the game, in the stands, behind the bleachers, on the sidelines, brimming with people (or as many people as a small town and a thousand-person student body would allow).
The games were the Friday-night entertainment (whenever we had a home game which may have been every other week or so) and I remember the pep rallies where we’d buy spirit ribbons in support of the booster club (i.e. so the football team and cheerleaders had money) and the band and cheerleaders would perform at the end of the school day in the basketball gym whilst the whole school painted themselves up in school pride and motivated the team to bring us to victory (which they sometimes did). I loved the school spirit of it and as a member of many school clubs and the track team, I was all for being involved in extracurriculars.
Side note, at my first homecoming dance as a freshman, I wore a skintight red dress, and I remember dancing with my longtime senior crush (well, one of them) – when I thought he had never so much as looked at me or even knew I existed – and him touching all over my waist and squeezing my bottom.
For my sophomore year dance with the skater boy, I also wore some kind of also skintight dress (although I’d started very sadly to grow big-ish boobs by this point – not that they come into this story at all) with one of those net, sparkly, kind of overlays that was a thing then. I’d made an effort on my hair (pin-straight and silky) and makeup and I think we met at the dance.
When one of the slow dance songs came on, we did the obligatory slow dance go-to move with my hands awkwardly on his shoulders and his around my waist and he kissed me. My very first kiss. Not his.
We wrote notes in class back and forth, exchanged in the hallway, where he’d fold them in those elaborate jigsaw puzzle/origami kind of way that all American kids knew and I never caught on to. He had very small neat handwriting.
We’d spend hours and hours on the phone after school, talking about all sorts of things, including his little sister and his German grandfather (and how we all loved gouda cheese). My Grammy’s grandparents were German. It felt intense in the way that first love/infatuations/whatevers do and I thought he really liked me.
That is until the total babe that is Krysten started at our school. She was blonde and thin (of course) with a small frame, a little shorter than me and maybe looked like if Kirsten Dunst and Gisele Bundchen had a baby.
I guess it was like the whole Mean Girls thing in which the hot, unassuming Cady moves into school usurping Regina except she was so nice and likeable that no one hated her and I wasn’t at the top of the popular food chain (in fact, I was definitely more of a Janice wallflower with my own friend group, in the orbit of the popular kids, known by them, but not part of them).
But she did usurp my place in First Kiss’s heart. Not long after, he had the hot blonde best friend (she was more of a Heidi Klum if Heidi was super pale with Nicole Kidman’s gorgeous skin type) tell me that he didn’t want to date me anymore.
I remember my Mum, stepfather, and maybe my stepsister and I driving out to dinner and I was hyperventilating with tears. Like, I seriously felt my chest was being crushed with anguish – and a ten-pound weight. I have no idea why this first heartbreak felt so intense, but it really did. I don’t remember my Mother comforting me or anything in particular. I think they were just baffled at how a two-week “relationship” could leave me feeling so distraught.
Even, sadly, writing this I still feel the weight of that emotion, an emotion that I only felt once again – when my first husband left me unexpectedly (naturally, more on that later).
But First Kiss was not to exit my life for good, oh no, he’d reappear again when I was in graduate school when I was twenty-four and he was twenty-three. So, I’ll be writing about him again soon – and our many hookups.
Until then, I had to avoid seeing him with Krysten and later his other girlfriend who I think he lost his virginity to. In retaliation or pining or both, I decided to make out with his girlfriend’s brother (and his friend) in the hopes of him noticing me (which I’ll go into in the next post). Again, which he never did – at least not in high school.
Don’t forget to check out the other four posts I’ve written, including the one on why I’m writing this newsletter/blog in the first place.
