On First Loves
Like the weasel, love is wild. As a slightly overweight—soft I’ll say—male, the high school dating scene held a few challenges for me. But, as my grandfather always said, “Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then.” Find a nut I did.
Her name was Samantha. Her shoulder-length downy hair culminated, as one would reasonably expect, at the top of her scalp. That scalp reached almost to a foot below my own. Her emerald eyes sparkled when she smiled, or should I say grinned? Her pale lips never quite made that inverted parabola; rather they curled inward at the ends much like the Grinch’s smile did. She was a very fine nut indeed.
Our love started simply enough. She and I had several classes together and got to know each other fairly well. I invited her to church several times. The two of us began to talk more and more often, and those first sprouts of a blossoming relationship began to spring from the topsoil of shared experiences. I have always been one for romance, hopeless though it may be, so rather than “asking her out” directly, I wrote a rather clever short story in which the main character was a bumbling oaf asking a beautiful princess to be his girlfriend. The ending was left intentionally blank, allowing for Samantha herself to pen the fate of that bumbling oaf. Later that day, I received my story back with a hug attached, and so it was that things became “official.”
Samantha and I (it was mostly me) were plagued with all the loveable awkwardness that young puppy love awards such star-crossed teenagers. In the age where girlfriends and boyfriends were required to hold hands, I was an odd duck because the very prospect filled me with such paralyzing fear that I was not the one to make such a brave move, but am I ever glad she was braver than I in that respect. The tight intertwining of fingers even now makes my fingers twitch in delight. Each of her fingers sat gracefully between each of mine; the slight pressure of the stretch our hands had to make to accommodate the foreign phalanges gave me then and gives me now that warm fuzzy feeling that crawls from the base of the spine into the base of the brain. That warm fuzzy clouds any and all sane judgment, so be wary.
Things could not have been better. About a month and a half after I timidly “asked her out,”—as was the custom of my peer group—, I spent the day at her house lounging around the pool. Both our sets of shoulders had been drawn taut and painted red by the day’s relentlessly beating rays. The sweltering Texas sun made the pool a welcome refreshment to quickly parching skin.
We laughed. We talked. I was totally enamored with this girl. For lunch, we made my favorite meal: a warm, gooey pot of macaroni and cheese. We ate; we laughed; we talked some more. As the sunlight quickly waned, she and I were sitting nervous hand in nervous hand in her room. She asked what my favorite part of the day had been. I thought hard, hands twitching, trying to decide which particular moment was the best part of what had already seemed to be a perfect day. Out my answer came thudding dully to the floor saturated with that sap only puppy love can produce: “Everything.”
She giggled and I felt my face begin to burn. Burning hotter than its sunburn should, that sudden rush of insecurity that threatens faintness washed over me. And then it passed. I returned the question expecting, hoping for that same sap I had just delivered when it happened.
“When I did this,” she said.
I can still feel her hands gently grasping the sides of and turning my unbelieving head. There were ten nearly imperceptible tingles as her fingers gently pushed causing minute movements in my hair. Then, as equally unfathomable as it was expected, the painful scrape of sunburned nose on sunburned nose. Then with the softest of touches, the lightest of brushes, her lips and mine did meet: warm, moist, the slightly ferrous taste that only a kiss can bring. Then it was over.
Her face was a new shade of red— red as the digital clock on the table across the room that read 9:18—we both giggled uncontrollably as that mind-numbing warm fuzzy filled both our brains. My face burned ever more fiercely with a new found modesty being simultaneously created and destroyed within me. That night, that week, that month, these last five years, I have carried the memory of the soft, moist, warm first kiss.
From that point onward things went well for us. We were young, and the longer we were together, the more and more that puppy love grew into a Dalmatian, then a St. Bernard.
First-love giddiness left my mind swimmy and after a year of our relationship she decided that it was time for our love to come to an end. I went from swimmy to sunk in a matter of seconds. Having been thoroughly crushed by the loss of my first love, I withdrew. The warm fuzzies had faded; rather, it was a cold prickly feeling snaking up my spine, wrapping itself ‘round my stomach, forcing its barbs deeply into each of my internal organs before bursting forth to the indescribable horror of those around me as the gore of my heart spilled forth from the gaping hole left in my chest.
Although that particular event was one of the more painful events in my short lifetime, it should be duly noted that broken hearts do mend. Immediately after she and I had parted ways, I felt as if I was swimming in tar. Every movement I made only served to stick me faster in the quagmire. The year following our breakup was a year of torture. The barbs of the cold prickly dug deeper and deeper as I struggled through the flypaper valley I had found myself in. I had some good friends who dug deeply in the muck and mire to rescue their quickly sinking buddy, and those friends will forever have a debt owed them.
I was young. She was young. Perhaps it was foolish to think of things beyond our ages, but I will never forget the tingles in my hair, the comfort of the pressure of another hand in my own, that warm, fuzzy, swimmy feeling that enveloped my brain. My first love will always and forever hold a place in my now mended heart. Other nuts are out there, scattered on the forest floor, and this blind squirrel will keep searching for the perfect nut for me.
