Day 10- First love and first kiss

I was eighteen when I had my first kiss, with a girl who categorically only dates really butch lesbians. This is what I looked like that summer.















I don't know why I'm making that face, but...all of her girlfriends are the type with inch-long hair and baseball caps and baggy jeans. Needless to say, we went on three dates and gave that up real fast. Later I found out that in the stories she told other people, our first-date peck on her driveway when I dropped her off became that we "hooked up," and our interactions for the rest of that summer became "that I got attached." It also turned out that she's absolutely batshit. But my first kiss was sweet. We walked around town and went to a diner. She took me to Walgreens and gave me a corny plush flower, and we sidewalk-chalked in the middle of the night. I dropped her off at her house and it was just a peck on the lips, but I was a kid and it was a huge deal at the time.

Love. I mean, there's teenage love, where you don't have to be in an actual relationship with them, but there's still that attachment, and then there's give-and-take, honest-with-each-other grown-up love. There's more to that last one than that, but honestly, I don't have the words. That first kind, I've had. My first one was a girl from a town about 40 minutes from my parents' house. We were "involved," on and off, from the summer before my sophomore year through my posts about needing a big sister this past winter. There were big gaps and other relationships, but it was this tortured long-distance mutual pining, texting-all-the-time mess. We had a couple of fights and there were a couple of times that we almost got together, but it was mostly a cycle of longing, brokenheartedness, and hope. I never really told her how I felt, though, that at some points there were a lot of good things between us. I never opened up about it at a good time, and at some point I figured out that that's where I went wrong. But I guess I learned to do that-- to be honest and to go for things.

Sometimes I feel like I have a handle on the real love thing, knowing what it means. I think I get it a little better now. It doesn't mean forever and it doesn't mean things are perfect but it means...something big.