The First Girl I Ever Kissed
the wrong place at the right time
The first girl I ever kissed was named Kate. No last name. She was five-foot nine, milky-skinned, with a tumultuous cloud of frizzy blond hair that flew from her head into a near-perfect triangle. Her laugh was persistently sardonic. She loved Stuart Sutcliffe, whom I’d never heard of but quickly heard too much of, and then she loved the Cure so much that it consumed her life as much as their posters consumed her bedroom walls. And she was so unhappy that I worried constantly—that I’d receive a call in the middle of the night saying, specifically, that she’d hanged herself on the shower rail; that the next time I saw her, she’d have more slashes on her pale arms that I couldn’t pass judgment about. I worried about her all the time.
All these years later, I don’t know if Kate ever worried about me. My lack of understanding about whether or not she actually gave a shit was what finally caused me to cut things off. I was suffused with that feeling that I was never going to be as important to her as I wanted to be, and it didn’t matter that she’d left a bouquet of flowers on my front step, or that she’d accompanied the flowers with a mix tape that included “Sally’s Song”:
And does he notice my feelings for him?
And will he see how much he means to me?
I think it's not to be
We started as best friends, as so many of these sapphic teenage stories go where emotions leap from one kind of electricity to another. We were oddballs in our odd town, a miserable, tiny place with a strange socioeconomic structure and a strict hierarchy of popular kids who did cocaine while the poor kids did meth. I don’t remember how we met. I just remember that once we connected, we started to spend all of our time together. I wanted to be around her all day, every day.
I knew by the time I was thirteen that I liked girls. No, not only girls, but I liked girls enough that I was shattered by the first one I fell for. (It was that girl who dressed me down for daring to call myself femme.) Somehow, I found out that Kate liked girls too. And that—well, she liked me.
The first time we kissed was in my bedroom while we watched the critically acclaimed film Sling Blade. I laugh when I recall this: why the fuck were we watching Sling Blade? Neither of us was a Billy Bob Thornton fan. We weren’t invested in his torrid romance with Angelina Jolie (although I was a fan of the kooky, Foxfire and Gia star Angelina Jolie, who dated Jenny Shimizu). But on that late afternoon, for whatever reason, I slipped the tape into the VCR, and we made out. I mean, we really did make out—sort of. Nothing about Sling Blade was romantic, and so one of us would burst into laughter every few seconds, but I was happy. That night, she came with me and my family to dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and we held hands in the back seat while no one noticed. (At least, I think no one noticed. If they had, I would have yanked back my hand as though it were on a hot stove.)
I must confess: I didn’t like how Kate kissed. She was not only the first girl I’d ever kissed, but she was the first human being I’d ever kissed, and yet I knew that how she kissed—by sucking both of my lips between her own so that my entire mouth was being ingested—was not how I wanted to be kissed. A phenomenon that I’ve experienced since I was very young is that when I see a physical interaction onscreen, I can feel everything that’s happening. And it’s not just that I can feel what one person is going through; I can feel what the other person is experiencing, too.
So I knew what it was like to kiss long before I ever did it. How she kissed me was not how I’d expected it to be. Later, when I kissed someone whose style wasn’t sympatico with mine, I’d gently make suggestions. But I let everything with Kate slide. I was so caught up in the dizzy specter of our romance that I overlooked too many things, including the fact that I wasn’t actually all that physically attracted to her. I liked having a girlfriend. I liked being in a relationship. Even when we went to the local mall, and received glares from mothers who literally yanked their children away from me while Kate and I held hands, I was glad that she loved me.
Kate was profoundly unhappy. She ran hot and cold, and then she moved to a seaside town a few hours away so that she could attend an all-girls Catholic school. (“where we’re all so bored that there’s nothing to do but each other,” she said airily). I brought her to my first concert: Sleater-Kinney with the Peechees and the Donnas on the Dig Me Out tour. She was in an awful mood that day—the one photo I have from that night at the Bottom of the Hill club is of me and my zine friends, grinning into the flash while you can see Kate in the background. She’s looking off to the side, bored. If you didn’t know she was there, you’d have no idea that we were there together.
I’d been afraid of exactly that side of her earlier that day. She’d begun to be upset when we went to Tower Records together earlier that day—and when I asked her why, she looked at me as though I were asking the stupidest question possible. “It just happens,” she said. referring to her foul mood. “I can’t control it.”
I worried about her incessantly. My friends would worry about me over the following decades, and I never thought about how I was, in some ways, becoming like Kate. Or that I’d always been like Kate from the beginning, and that’s why I loved her.
What broke up our relationship was, of all things, swimming. She’d told me that she would be at my house at one. (This was, of course, back in the 90s, when it was much harder to get in touch with someone if they didn’t show up when they said they would.) One o’clock came, and then two, and then three. I was sobbing, in hysterics. I was terrified that something horrible had happened to her. A million scenarios scrolled rapidly through my mind.
And then the phone rang. It was Kate.
“So,” she said breezily, “I ended up going swimming. It was just such a nice day, you know? Can I still come over?”
I was confused. She’d been swimming. I’d never, ever heard her sound so… easy-going. So carefree. And she still wanted to come over.
I said that I needed to ask my mother. I put her on hold, and I gave my mother (who had no idea about my romantic relationship with Kate, although I suspect that she suspected), who had witnessed me go through hours of emotional torment, the short version of what Kate had said to me.
"Tell her that she can’t come,” she said.
And I didn’t ask, Why? or Are you sure? Instead, I went back to the phone, and I told her that she couldn’t come that day. That was how our relationship ended: not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Even though I refused to let Kate get back in touch—much easier because she now lived in that seaside town—I was wrecked by what we’d shared for years afterward. I started seeing my high school counselor because all I could talk about was Kate and how I’d loved her and how she’d ended up—what was it? Destroying me? I’d been in love, but had I really? Why was I actually, actually such an emotional wreck?
I’d end up in other relationships that were like the ones I had with Kate, and ones that were terrible in other ways. I dated a cheerleader who had never met Kate, but was fiercely jealous of her ghost, and accused me again and again of still being in love with her. But that’s another story, for another time.
Journal prompt of the week
Who was the first person you ever kissed (if you have kissed someone)? Or, a variation: who do you wish it had been?
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