First love

My first love was a boy. A beautiful boy named Chris who was kind to me.

I'd had crushes on boys and girls before I met Chris when I was around 18. I could easily identify the crushes on boys since, you know, girls were 'supposed' to like boys. The girls I liked? I just had a desire to form, as a friend of mine puts it, an intense friendship with them. But they were crushes.

Until I got to college, boys had never really been that nice to me. I was a shy kid who gained weight seemingly exponentially, so I was always the fat girl. Hence, target. I got into a lot of fights on the playground in elementary school, often grabbing a boy by the shirt collar and hurling him to the ground in a rage. In junior high, the guy I sat next to in band class for two years made booming sounds as I walked across the classroom. In high school, I chased boys down the hall and cornered them in classrooms for whatever unkindness they'd extended my way.

I guess I expected more of the same when I got to college, but things took a different turn. Boys were after a different kind of attention and I attracted a few miscreants, surprised and pleased to have boys paying attention to me. All the while, I was deeply into Chris. He had short, dark brown hair, wore a leather jacket, smoked, and smelled like Drakkar. Hey, it was 1992.

I can't go into a lot of specifics because I can't remember most of them. I remember being drunk at some college party and Chris sitting next to me on my friend's couch and making me laugh. I remember being elated when we were euchre partners for the many games of cards I played during my first 18 months of college. I remember kissing him one New Year's Eve in my dad's brand-new car that is now my beloved, old-ass hoopty.

Sadly, about a year after we met, Chris and I had a fight. I liked him too much, I guess, and had called him one too many times at his dorm. I remember him yelling and calling me a psycho bitch, which hurt and embarrassed me for a long time. There's not much I can do with that now. It was the last time we talked and there was little reason to try and contact him anymore. By the time it felt safe to reach out to him again, he probably would've been in a different dorm, different college, or even graduated. Of course, it wouldn't have taken long for him to become a different boy, just as I became a different girl.

Chris and I are both around 40 now, which seemed an impossibility when 20 hadn't even happened yet. I'm sure he's married with a bunch of kids. Maybe he remembers our friendship, or maybe he only remembers slamming the phone down after our last conversation. I was just starting the process of coming out back then, liking Chris at the same time that I began to call myself bi-curious, bisexual, and, eventually, lesbian. Regardless of who I prefer to date now, I'll always remember the night Chris and I were driving somewhere -- a friend's house, probably -- and I absentmindedly put a cigarette in my mouth before looking for my lighter. Suddenly, but not so much that it startled me from paying attention to the road, a flame appeared from his Zippo, and I was caught in the heady scent of lighter fluid, leather jacket, Drakkar, and the cigarette's first burst of smoke. A slow smile broke across my face in the dark car and no moment ever seemed more perfect.

Hey, it was 1992.