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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.
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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.
No public raging for Hynes this time. No choice but to sit tight. That same hellish heart-pounding panic I'd first felt 10 years previous, when Clara bolted. But, closing in on 30 I guess I'd look a right fool if I hadn't learned a thing or two: Rejection can transform the cockiest, most self-assured individual into a splayed and gutted emotional mess. But if this feeling could kill you, you'd be dead 10 times over, years ago. No, you will not die because you're no longer required in someone else's bed. Don't dare pick up that phone. Do not go down to that bar. Brawl against the hunger for revenge until you just aren't hungry any more. It's just like death — it is never, ever coming back, or at least it's never, ever going to take on the same form.
And one other thing, Hynes — stay away from them Catholic girls.
After Isadora I spent about a year tooling around, determined to plug that mythical year of celibacy and mourning.
And then I met Jenny. Lo and behold, an intense and grounded blue-eyed Protestant girl from the suburbs who'd never tasted rabbit before.
Both of us still slightly wounded and predictably cautious, myself and Jenny took our time moving toward the kiss.
A few nights after we met, I challenged her to a game of checkers, each of us lingering 10 full minutes over our next moves, watching each other fixatedly. Maybe years are coming? Maybe, if we think every moment through. Does she notice that I can take out three of her pieces and then king myself in one move? Of course she noticed. And she's noticed every one since.
Into our third summer now. Motorcycling, fixing up an old house. She bought me an oil lamp last Christmas, and I really, really needed it. So I want to believe Jenny saw that murk inside me right away and just didn't feel the need to poke at it or dissect it. (Therein lay the fundamental distinction between Protestant and Catholic love affairs.) She just let me have it, let me sit in it, holding firm that even though I might pull the shades from time to time, I'm bound to let a little light back in sooner or later. And I like to believe that too. Suits me fine. Although I'm sure she's wanted to crack a belt buckle off my face more than once. And I'm sure I've deserved it. I really have.
Joel Hynes is the author of Down to the Dirt and Right Away Monday.
