This is the sixth of a 10-part series featuring Canadian writers' true tales of love.
Fourteen when I had my first kiss. Rachel was shy, reserved, a genuine sweetheart. So it wasn't going any further than a kiss. I darted my tongue around, likely slobbered on her. Our teeth clacked. Tall grassy Newfoundland meadow with a fresh-smelling, cautious Catholic girl my own age. But how could she not know I'd already gotten up to everything else with a woman twice my age, who was not shy or reserved? That I'd already done the deed and all the deeds that go with it?
Yes, that's backwards. It's supposed to evolve from the kiss, progress to a stolen, tentative caress, a handful of sweater, a dull hickey, an earlobe in your mouth, fingertips grazing the tight curls of something soft, something warm… All that starts with a kiss. And if the kiss doesn't work, that's as far as it goes. Rachel knew that, never gave me another glance.
First love, a girl named Clara. Librarian-esque with a passion for horror novels. We watched movies, ate snack bar, parked her mom's car along back roads until the windows had to be wiped down from the inside. A new revelation for me; that you could do this deed and, long after you're both spent, feel for each other. And maybe talk.
Still, no amount of talking could convince me that I wasn't on borrowed time. Rough and tumble by then, trouble at home, cops at the door, I could not for the life of me figure out what she saw. Sure enough, a year later I'm on my knees, my arms wrapped about her legs, begging her to keep seeing what she thought she used to see.
The hurricane year that followed, not knowing what that knot in my stomach was. Heart pounding in the bed at night. Pulling broken glass across my arms. Cigarettes squashed on the back of my hands. Rampaging up and down the shore, kicking at fences, not knowing what heartache even was. Not knowing that all hearts, the world over, collapse with the same savage, confused abandon. Ahhhh the romance…
Eighteen and trying my luck with a real hard ticket. Natasha pierced her own ears, scratched lyrics into her arms with a needle, raged against any situation that didn't rage back in a series of flashes and blurs. We had sort of a Sid and Nancy thing going on, although I would have liked to have gotten to play Sid every now and then. Once, she caught me at a party in St. John's with some other girl. She seductively slipped my belt off my jeans, smiling all the while, then wrapped it tight around her hand and cracked me across the face with the buckle. I liked Natasha. We stayed together for another three years until I skipped the country and dyed my hair black. As a little footnote, Natasha is a happy and healthy, dedicated momma these days. I see her around once in a while and she kinda doesn't think I'm the worst thing ever happened to her.
Something snapped inside me when I fell in with Isadora. Yet another semi-jaded Catholic girl; I was starting to observe a pattern. An upstart actress on the tail end of her wild days, Isadora had a flare for community-oriented breakups. So we busted up every second day until she took on sobriety like a new religion and struck out on her own.
