Three First Kisses
So, I’ve basically had three first kisses, and none of them count.
It was my first girlfriend who said to me once, and inspired this whole entry, “your first kiss is the first one where it feels real.” I would know it when it arrived. I would know if it felt real, if it counted. And after three different kisses, three degrees of ‘realness,’ none of them count.
You would never hear of me identifying as anything approximating a-[something] at the age of sixteen. Freshly out as a lesbian, inundated with recently discovered scratchings of pop-culture representation, a new sense of *queer enlightenment,* and (thanks to puberty) a whole lot of oestrogen. Every passing moment, nay, perhaps every moment, was spent thinking of women, and the romantic hijinks they could get up to. I fantasised so much that I annoyed people (including myself. Could I not stop thinking about two girls kissing long enough to do my maths homework?)
You need to understand what a thrill this was for me, coming out to myself. Allowing myself these little guilty thoughts, off in my own fictional worlds or those of my favourite franchises. And they were guilty - my Christian girls’ school environment guaranteed it. I grew up not even knowing that homosexuality was a thing until I was about twelve, let alone a thing that applied to me. But romance, at least cisheteronormative romance, that had been baked into my psyche from day dot. By Disney movies, and especially songs, but largely by the pervasive cultural worship of romanticism in contemporary society.
For as long as I could remember, I had resisted conversations about partnership or dating or marriage, because (retrospectively) I had thought it only possible with a man. As far as my younger self was concerned, I would never get married, I would never kiss a boy and I would never do the sex thing, no matter how many how many times the lines “you’ll understand when you’re older,” or “you’re missing out on so much” were churned out.
And though I stuck with this opinion, whether I was 5 or 15, these lines did get to me. I used to get angry at the overabundance of songs about love and sex. I even wrote a song when I was eleven about how I was sick about songs about love! Because I couldn’t know it, not if there was to be a boy involved. But from what countless songs had drilled into my head, love had to be the greatest thing in the world. So rather than allow myself to live with the pain of being denied, I developed a passionate hatred for all that cushy *feelings* stuff.
Imagine, then, the impact of the discovery that love was an option for someone like me, because loving women was, a thing! It wasn’t a thing I had to blush about and force out of my mind in shame, it was to a reasonable degree, a thing that was accepted (though hardly encouraged). All of a sudden, it began to dawn on my teenage self, that it was possible for me to reach that level of indescribable happiness sung about in all my favourite songs. And I began to crave that happiness.
And it culminated in the first of the first kisses, at age seventeen. And I’ll spoil the ending for you now; this was the realest of the lot of them, and it didn’t even happen. Not in real life, anyway; in a dream.
It wasn’t much. A cool goth girl gave me a lift home after a party and we ended up making out in her old car, at the docks, Melbourne skyline glittering in the background. It’s weird coming back to it now, trying to explain what a meteoric effect this one dream had had on me. I spent the following weekend in a blushing daze, everything rosy and beautiful around me, absolutely manic with happiness, to the point where I could barely form words for the beating of my heart, and every other moment felt like going downhill on a rollercoaster. I went to school on Monday and raved to my friends about it with the zeal of if it had actually happened. “You don’t understand,” I’d said to multiple people that week, “I know it was a dream, but I’ve had my first kiss.”
So vivid was the memory that I was able to diarise the dream in almost perfect detail a year later, down to the tastes and smells and temperature. Maybe it was the many repeated viewings of it in my mind, over and over at any point which I longed for affection (which was constantly. It’s not like I was getting any).
And if my expectations of what a first kiss was supposed to be were inflated before, my gods, did that dream blow them up to the size of Jupiter.
The Second First kiss, I knew from the moment it had happened that it didn’t count. The only reason I even consider it a first kiss is because it is technically the first actual kiss I’d had with a person who was real.
It was a male person, a young male person, two years younger than myself, who at the time was eighteen. And no, I wasn’t suddenly not a lesbian - and I told him straight off the bat that I was gay. When he pulled me away from the party we were both attending, I knew his intentions. But I was also severely depressed, easily influenced and half drunk, and after a few of his sob stories, a few more drinks, a few impromptu songs and poems, a few rounds of “just your cheek, I promise, close your eyes…”
I won’t go on. I don’t fully feel comfortable even talking about it, let alone writing about it publicly. I could play this for more drama, because believe me there’s more drama in this story, but I just don’t want to. I was eighteen - I’m nearly 21, and my parents still don’t know the truth of it.
Someone who did know, however, was my first girlfriend.
She might be reading this; even if she sees the penname, she’ll know who’s written this. Although, I’ll doubt she’ll read this publication given her *interesting* views on asexuality, but that’s beside the point. For the first time, if she does read this, and learns how I really feel, I don’t care. I’ve spent enough time protecting the feelings of people who have hurt me.
Credit where credit is due, for the line which inspired the piece. And, for the advice, that I don’t have to apologise for what happened to me with that boy after the party, in my eighteenth summer. That nothing that happened was my fault, and I shouldn’t blame myself if I’m taken advantage of again. It was a lesson that, growing up surrounded by feminist seminars at the advent of #metoo, I had not expected to need to hear again. A lesson I did not expect to have to apply to her own behaviour so soon.
Did my third first kiss, with her, feel real? I can’t remember. I was on like my sixth fireball.
She was very crafty. She’d done this with other girls before. Teasing me into confessing feelings I didn’t really have. Calling us ‘official’ way too early into our apparent crush, to make me commit. She knew my state of mind. She recognised someone gullible and vulnerable. We’d been friends for some time, after I started uni, at the end of my eighteenth summer. She knew of my Jupiter-sized expectations for the rapture of romance, which now, after the boy, I needed to make back. The next first kiss would need to make up for what he stole.
I really was sort of ripe for the picking. With the exception of the aforementioned party, I had spent nearly my entire eighteenth summer in a nowhere town halfway to South Australia, where the median age was 65. Now back in metropolitan Melbourne, I was flirting with every girl who made eye-contact with me. I was a disgrace, really. A disgrace who was in denial about the pain summer had dealt her, about her burgeoning questions of asexuality, in denial about the nature of love at all, if any of those songs had told the truth. I needed to be taught the truth of love; a supportive partnership with someone who was a friend first and foremost, who cared about me, who not only would be patient about my fluctuating sexual needs, but wouldn’t expect a sexual performance at all.
What I got was... not that.
It was always a “when” for her, not the “if” it was for me. When I asked what she liked about me, (and I had to ask often for I wasn’t sure she did), the pervasive answer was something about my thighs and/or boobs. She had two girlfriends at the time, and she made no pretence about which of the pair of us she preferred (it wasn’t me). I had tried sexting with her a few times - no images, just text - and doing so, I felt like I was sitting an exam; which answer would glean the highest score? I could go on and on about her wrongdoings, and I probably recognised them as such at the time. But it didn’t matter. I had a girlfriend now. Who knew when I was going to get one again? I had a girlfriend and I was going to get a kiss, from a girl. A first kiss, a real one, the only thing I had really wanted, every day, for years now. And I would have put up with anything to get one.
We broke up the morning after the Third First kiss. Two weeks official, eight total having known each other. Even while drunk I didn’t want the extent of what she was offering, on the floor of her preferred girlfriend’s garage in the woods, where there was no escape. I think by that point she figured she was dealing with *one of those asexuals,* and there was no point in continuing the charade if she wasn’t getting any thigh and/or boob.
And so we broke it off, and she left me with a sob story about how my mixed signals had made her confused and upset. Mixed signals? No is still no when I’m wasted and dancing in my underwear.
Was she indeed dealing with one of those asexuals? I still don’t know, and I’m hesitant to use the label, because I’m now old enough to know that I still don’t know myself. At the time of writing, I haven’t had my Fourth First Kiss. And I’m not longing for it. Affection, love, even the sex thing, maybe. I do still use the lesbian label, concretely. And, as much as they were a product of cultural ozmosis (and puberty), I don’t think the Jupiter-sized longings were fake. They were real, and my aceness is real too, but so is my pain. Extricating them from each other is a task I have yet to undertake, one I’m uncertain is even worth doing. Does any of it even matter?
What I take away from all meditations on my own trauma is, how can I help the little girls (and those of other genders too) like me, subject to the same obsession with romance being hammered into their little heads? My first answer is, maybe we ought to write more songs about other things. And I’m the hopeful sort. I reckon we’re getting there.
