My first kiss.

[framlingem]

Her name was Melissa, I think. Her hair was long and curly and golden, with poufy bangs, and she was beautiful. She was six. I was five. I came late into her class, and she hated me. I didn't know why. I shared my crayons, I was nice, I gave her a Christmas card. People loved her. I loved her - how could I not? She was beautiful and perfect. But her voice was cold and her words were hard, and she taught me that I was not loveable. I was a dark, ugly little thing, who read at the level of one much older and spoke decent French while she struggled, and tried to play dodgeball but lacked the coordination I later gained, years after everyone else. I could not catch a ball. I could not draw the princesses she made stream from the markers I tasted to please her before she told me that they were poison. I was dying, she said, faster and faster, and when the poison reached my heart I would be dead. It was dripping onto my tonsils, and she could see it getting nearer and nearer my heart. Only minutes left, now, she told me.

I made a friend. In February, I made a friend. His name was Nick. Nicky. Emily and Nicky, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G... We built snowmen together. Every recess, we built a snowman, and every time we returned to find it beaten into a slushy pile of submission. We built them anyway.

One day we were still there when she found it, with her friends. We were two little children in snowpants patched at the knees, and we were dark. Her curls gleamed in the winter sun, and freckles framed her eyes. They gathered around us, Nicky and me, and it started up again, Emily and Nicky, sitting in a tree... and became a chant of Kiss! Kiss! Kiss! and they grabbed my head and his and pushed us together, and he tasted of crackers and apples, and they pushed so hard that it hurt me and they wouldn't let go, and all the while they shouted and crushed us.

And Nicky never spoke to me again. Ever. I lost him, and I don't know why I'm telling anyone this, but that was my first kiss, and I know it wasn't my fault... It's not the story I usually tell people when they ask about my first kiss... I give them Matt in the kitchen with the thunder outside, but that one dirty kiss was my first. One of my best friends was playing today and had me trapped against a wall, and I panicked and cringed away, and he didn't know why I was afraid and he felt bad. I can't tell him why. I hate being trapped, I hate being crushed face-to face with someone, because I can still hear them. They're my nightmares. It shouldn't bother me so much. It was fourteen years ago.

I almost typed 'I have forgiven them', but I guess I haven't. If I had forgiven them, I don't think I'd still see their faces so clearly. I know they were wrong - that I am loveable (more, that I am loved), and that it is possible for a little girl to be friends with a little boy without loving him.

The whole thing has made me stronger, I like to think. It gave me the basis for my best short story - the one I will never publish, because I don't want my mother to read it and know, because it will hurt her to know that she could not have helped, and because I don't want the world to know. Except I do want to publish it, all 7000 words of it, to tell people, to make them see that this should not be, make them feel it, and know that it does happen, and that nothing is done about it if blood is not drawn. I bled like hell - just not noticeably. It has given me empathy, and depth.

But it still takes so much out of me to kiss someone. There's a reason I prefer hugs. The kisses are worth the cost, yes, but the cost is great. And it has been so very long and heavy, my first kiss.

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[ladyshrew.livejournal.com]

::hugs:: God, I can't imagine how traumatizing that must have been. I wish I could say something more comforting than "I'm sorry it happened," but for what it's worth, I am...

-Me