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The first time I tried to love you, I was fifteen and you were sixteen and neither of us knew what the fuck we were doing.
We were sitting on the floor in your bedroom and we were listening to Green Day. It was summer and we were eating Skittles and it was raining outside, the kind of storm that comes out of nowhere and feels like it’s never going to end. And when it does, sometimes too late, sometimes too soon, sometimes right after you’ve found shelter but you’re already soaked to the bone, it still feels like it hasn’t. Because the smell of it remains. It lingers in the air, steaming off warm streets and pavements and lifting up from the drenched sides of country lanes. You have a word for it. That smell. Well, we do, really, but that has always felt like your word to me. Your favourite word. The word I associate with the first time you kissed me.
You kissed me softly and tentatively but also like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Like it was always meant to happen. You took my face into your hands and announced it, in a small voice, I’m going to kiss you now. And I don’t know if you were just giving yourself a pep talk or if you were asking for my permission, but I still said yes, nodded, and sat very still. And then you crashed into me and took my breath away.
You had asked me, days before, if I’d ever kissed a boy. We were at football practice and you were wearing hot pink shorts and someone had just called you a bender, but you’d just smiled and flipped them off and pulled me in and pecked my cheek and called me your boyfriend, playing it all up until the two cunts who were bothering you finally left. I thought long and hard before giving you a proper answer, because technically I had. Two months before then, at a house party you oddly didn’t show up for, one where I’d been way too far gone after way too few drinks, we’d played spin the bottle and the bottle had landed on me and Chris Davies. Everyone in school fancied Chris, but I’d always found him way too full of himself and way too heterosexual and I was happy to learn I’d been right all along. He looked completely horrified when everyone started cheering as we crawled closer to each other, both on our knees, and he winced and then fully recoiled when our lips barely brushed.
So no, I didn’t think I’d ever actually kissed a boy, and that’s exactly what I told you. Cool, you said. And then you grinned, finished tying your shoes, and winked at me while you bounced off, out onto the pitch, and I sat there wondering what it all meant and forgot to get changed until the coach came and got me and then yelled at me for being late.
So no, I had never kissed a boy, and then suddenly that wasn’t true anymore. Because I was doing it, right at that moment. I was kissing a boy. And you were that boy. And I immediately knew that meant something, even if I wasn’t quite sure what it was at the time. Even if it took me years to be sure.
You kissed me and I kissed you, and before I knew it our legs were tangled and I was lying on the carpet and you were on top of me, the shape of you moulding to the shape of me until I couldn’t quite figure out where you ended and I began. Your lips were my lips, your hands were my hands, your breath was my breath, your voice was my voice and none of it was making sense. But also, it made all the sense in the world.
You chose a nine-minute song as the soundtrack to our kiss, and that felt intentional. And no matter how depressing the story the lyrics told was and how erratic the rhythm felt, in constant flux between slow and fast, oscillating between guitars and shattering drums and even fucking bells, sometimes: it felt like the right choice. If anything, because it was long.
Doesn’t feel very deep, thinking about it now, but maybe it’s because it wasn’t meant to be. It was just meant to be me and you and you and me and us, all that we were then and all that we could become. We were green. We were rosebuds. We were stem cells. We were a pulsating orb of potentiality.
On that summer afternoon in your bedroom that sounded like your favourite album and smelled like your favourite word and tasted like your favourite sweets, you and I were infinite.
The first time I tried to love you, even if it was sudden and clumsy and unplanned and sloppy, I felt like I’d succeeded.
The first time I tried to love you, I was fifteen and you were sixteen and neither of us knew what the fuck we were doing.
Or maybe you did. I’ve never quite figured that one out.