The first person I thought I was in love with: We’d gone to school together forever, but the first time we talked was on my parent’s roof in Texas. He brought me cocaine and I gave him a cigarette and put my Huck Finn hat on his head. He was wearing leopard pants that were so tight he had to safety pin the crotch shut (though it would be a long time before I got to find that out). He was taciturn by nature, but he smiled soft and sly and I could tell that he liked me. I had lost thirty pounds over the last month, and hadn’t quite realized that my high school real estate value had skyrocketed with the ascent of my eating disorder. I still felt big, clumsy—I had been terribly teased in middle school, so all of this still felt like a teen movie. Clear, bright, ecstatic.
The first person I really loved: Thanksgiving. Texas. He seemed to make me good again with each kiss. I saw myself becoming worthy through his eyes. He showed me there was still truth, hope, a path out of the dark wood I’d been stumbling through since my best friend’s suicide several months before. No condoms or dirty words. That softness. Our hands drifting like loosed lily pads over each other. We moved as through a dream. My sad eyes through the dark. His hardness pressed against my back, kissing me softly; tentative in the joy of that permission. He stroked me like something small and fragile, his hands on my side, the places where I fold. “You have a girlfriend.” “I know. I don’t like my girlfriend.” Beside me on a step, two scared children at the edge of a primordial dark. At Goodwill the next morning, he bought me a stuffed frog of purple velvet. The clerk, a round-faced, middle-aged woman with a West Texas accent, beamed at us, chuckled. He kissed my forehead. Who did I think I could be but the dark seductress? The girl with the witchy eyes crouched in the corner of the woods?
Little Bristling Soul 