I'm answering this pretty separately since I talk too much and everything I'm writing about ends up turning into an essay.
Here goes:
My first kiss...was not necessarily so beautiful it bared remembrance. I felt like I was a late bloomer when I was a kid. Everyone was kissing in like 5th and 6th grade, so I lied to all my best friends when I was in sixth grade that I had kissed a boy I had a total crush on. I made it this salacious, torrid affair, when in truth, I was scared of kissing boys because I knew I was awkward, skinny, and unstylish, and terribly unpopular in my elementary school.
This guy was totally awesome by my childhood reckoning. Definitely cream of the crop. I mean, he wore baggy Dickies brand pants, baggy tattered sweatshirts, Puma shoes (before they got super mainstream), he could break dance. Ahhh, he was so hip-hop, so gangsta. This guy was popular and white. Even back then, my twelve year old self quivered in the nether regions--or at least I thought I did--whenever I thought about him looking my way.
He knew I existed; we were in the same class. He was nice enough to me, but he didn't, say, go out of his way to strike up conversations with me or anything. Or look my way, or act all chivalrous or anything. In fact, unless we were all talking in a lively conversation in class, he pretty much treated me like a text book. It's there, it's got all this knowledge, but you don't engage with it unless you really have to. It's furniture. It's just... there.
Oh man, I totally wanted him.
Anyway, so I lied that I kissed him to my best friend two and a half years younger who supposedly had already kissed someone, even though bitch was only ten. And that lie sustained my social development and standing until my first real kiss when I was fifteen or sixteen.
The kiss was uglier than an awkward TV kiss they dramatize on TV. The bumbling, fumbling, misplaced, slobbery meeting of two fifteen-sixteen year old lips that can't find the proper fit or figure out the right amount of tongue to probe the depths of the other's mouth. It was horrific in retrospect. At the time, it was wet but exhilarating. But it was less of a first "kiss" than a total slobber-fest make out session on a couch with elbow-in-the-face, knee-to-the-thigh, misplaced-hands grinding on my couch. I could feel buzzing in my stomach, buzzing in my hoo-ha, buzzing in my ears, buzzing in my head, tingling on my lips (after I wiped them down with the back of my hand).
I think most of what thrilled me wasn't the fact that I was a horny teenager and there was a really cute guy writhing on top of me, wrinkling the cornflower blue sofa cover out of it's meticulously tucked place. If my mum knew what was going on and why the couch was so perturbed when she saw it when she came home, she would've kicked me out of the house (they are very religious/conservative/repressive parents--basically very Christian and very Asian), or at least grounded me until I went off to college. Anyway! I think what was the most loin-exciting thing, besides the pure physicality of what was going on in my living room, was that I didn't have to live a lie anymore about being a kissing virgin. I mean, who has their first kiss in 11th grade? What kind of loser doesn't get kissed before upperclassman-ship? I was social poison, if my lie were to surface. I mean, I wasn't a total dork in High School, and I didn't have volcanic eruptive acne on my face, but I could be socially lost if anyone discovered that I wasn't truly first-kissed in elementary school like I'd claimed.
Of course I know now that nobody would've given a flying fuck whether I'd been kissed in sixth grade or not. I mean, my best friend a full two years behind me in school probably would've given a shit that I'd lied to her, but that's probably about it.
Kids are so dumb sometimes.
I don't remember his name, come to think of it. I do remember he and I were avid pals on AOL IM and in San Diego based Asian chat rooms, and he wore goggles around his neck in his avatar, but other than that, his name totally escapes me. Henry? Dan? He was Vietnamese with a totally traditional "white boy" name. He drove a riced out Honda Civic.
And I'm not entirely sure, but I don't think he and I ended up being friends too much longer after our adventures in teen hormones in my family room that one Saturday night.
We both thought that making an appointment to make out via AOL instant message was romantic and mature. Hello, totally grown up. So digital. So Twenty-first Century. I told all my friend who were going ice skating that night that I was sick, and he planned to come over, then we'd go to Taco Bell, pick up some burritos and hit up Blockbuster for the latest action flick, go back home to my house and "hang out."
Let me tell you, burrito breath makes for pretty sexy make out sessions. I kid you. We barely ate, because I was too nervous. I sat there picking lint off that cornflower blue sofa cover while explosions erupted and blasted from the entertainment system. He sat there picking at his burrito, issuing an occasional muffled laugh at the movie. I don't remember which movie it was.
Somehow, by the middle of the movie, he had migrated from his end of the couch to mine, and started playing with my ears. Then everything in between that and me nibbling his ear, and him straddling me, agressively necking me pretty much is a blur. We teleported from stage 1 to stage 12 as far as first kisses go. Did it last fifteen minutes? Did it last the rest of the movie? Did we ever finish eating those burritos and then torture each other with awkward conversation and burrito breath?
Oh boy, I can't remember. The rest of the night and the movie were totally memory-makers...Obviously as memorable as the boy's name. The stuff dreams are made of.
What I do remember, however, is that my second kiss also happened that night: a short, sweet kiss goodbye we shared before he drove off into the orange street-light illuminated night.
