My wife, not the subject

I ascribe exes' significance by dint of the fact that we had sex. It is not the best metric, but it explains somewhat why I stuck around beyond the point where it was wise. There were earlier relationships with better, purer feelings, but we never discovered how well our genitals interlocked.

The first happened over twenty years ago, a number intimidating now. I have spent more of my life sexually active than sexless, depending on how one counts sexual preambles, activities between kissing and those that leave one only more frustrated.

Given the nature of memories and decades and my literary embellishment, little of this should be considered admissible testimony.

My first was a close friend for years -- I had many friends at that time in my life, but I always liked her. When I was in tenth grade, we had chemistry together (literally more than figuratively). We dated for three days before she decided she didn't want to and I moved on. I was her first kiss, in the hallway outside the classroom, though she was in eleventh grade at the time. I don't know that she was a late bloomer as much as disinterested in boys to that point.

In time, I would be her first most everything.

She was thin and slight, a pert nose, freckles, content that she had yet to develop enough to need a bra since that made her more like "one of the guys." Her hair was chestnut and straight, sometimes with unfortunately high and severe bangs. I had seen too many girls in stages of undress before her. I had never then seen something as pretty as her on my bed.

I crushed on her in the last days of seventh grade. Her first words to me were "I can make my eyeballs vibrate," followed by a demonstration as close as kissing. It is an unfair act if you do not want someone to like you.

The tipping point was the day we were on our way to Scholastic Matchup, a game show filmed at a local college for brainy kids with nothing better to do. (She was academically average, but we needed more people on the team and she liked trips.) We were talking about my then girlfriend and her close friend. For reasons I'll never adequately explain, the air catalyzed into electricity. We both knew it and felt dread, the ease by which this could happen if we were not careful. We looked at respective pictures of our actual partners to try to cool off, which only drew attention. (She had a boyfriend, but he is otherwise irrelevant. Unbeknownst to her, he allowed a man to perform sodomy on him, because it wasn't gay if you repented afterward. His right to be an aggrieved party is nil.)

We did not kiss that day. I loved my girlfriend and she idealized me for years, past what I deserved. I wanted to be good to her. I wanted to be faithful. She deserved it and much more.

While working at Kevin McCurdy's Haunted Mansion with my friend, the tension of being in close quarters, so late, so often proved too much. She and I made out. It wasn't inevitable, but it happened. I felt horrible afterward. I did not tell my girlfriend because I wanted to be with her. (I should have stayed with that girlfriend and never touched my friend.) My friend did not want to be with me. She lusted for me, having only recently discovered the concept.

I told my then best friend of my ethical conundrum. His advice was to use my friend how I liked because she didn't deserve more than that. I punched him, then had to justify every way my friend deserved my illicit attention and he deserved the hit.

I should have punched him harder for making me do that.

He then started making out with her, which solved my quandary by the worst default. By telling my supposed best friend I had kissed our friend, he decided she was open for business.

I renewed my relationship with my unwitting girlfriend and everyone was happy, if guilty.

Then I made out with my friend again, because she did not like my best friend (or her boyfriend, whom she dumped at some point in all this) and she did want me.

During one of our sessions of infidelity, my hand ventured either up or down. She stopped me. Without being mine alone, she could not allow this trespass. It was the first time I thought she wanted to be with me, though she said otherwise.

My friend later gave me a hickey days before I was to see my girlfriend, telling me I was hers now. I was too turned on to argue and understood there would be no way to explain the mark otherwise. I broke up with my girlfriend, who took all this much better than I would have in her position.

My new girlfriend and I dated for seven months, from November to June. I told her I loved her at the winter formal, during a slow dance. She did not say it back for another six months. Even then, it was not with conviction. I do not believe she ever loved me. Who she was then was not someone capable of more than attraction and attachment. She was fond and friendly. She liked me, but she didn't fathom romantic love. At the time, I said that I aimed to love a soul into her. This should have been a warning sign I was too optimistically stupid to see.

She admitted that she had feelings for me for a while before the cheating. When I asked why she didn't pursue me, she pointed out that I always had a girlfriend. I retorted that I always had a girlfriend in part because she wouldn't date me, which satisfied her ego. (I was not pestering her with my interest, but I did consider her and flirt when I was single.)

Everything physical with her felt right. Never had a kiss felt better, which alone could be mistaken for love.

And yet.

And yet, we could do nothing to satisfy the other party. We tried, for hours at a stretch, but we were too nervous and inexperienced to accomplish our earnest goals or give helpful tips. Had anything worked prior, we would not have had sex. We shouldn't have, but much that followed was predicated on having slept with someone who dumped me shortly afterward. Without this girl rejecting me hard, I would not have found Kate months after, who did not need a soul loved into her. I would not have one day found the girl who let me break through my issues to purely love her, then the woman who benefited from all my progress and married me. That heartbreak set me on a path that brought me on a circuitous path to now.

My girlfriend and I tried sex once, but Tab B did not quite fit into Slot A. For the following days, I was wrecked, thinking I gave up my virginity to the wrong person for the wrong reason. I badly wanted still to be a virgin, having built up that status as meaningful. She informed me that, no, that did not count. I was so relieved that I had sex with her our next opportunity, during a Godzilla movie marathon.

We fell into sex with a convert's fervor, venting every ounce of the months of frustration in the final weeks of our relationship. To me, sex was an epiphany. To her, sex was "kissing, but more so."

I went to geek camp for two weeks, behaving myself despite the temptation of clever, lovely girls trying to crawl into my lap or asking me to be their first kisses (and whatever else I felt drawn to do). A part of me regrets she didn't dump me before, so I could have had those two weeks with beautiful strangers to distract me.

After coming home from my weeks away, she and I began to fool around. I do not remember if she was an enthusiastic participant to that point, but she was not resistant until I felt her up. She told me to stop, that it didn't feel good, that it only tickled. I couldn't comprehend this, but I obeyed.

She dumped me over the phone that week. She said it wasn't someone else, she was done with our relationship. I tried to argue -- we lost out virginities to one another, I loved her -- but you can't argue your way out of dumped.

A few days after, my former best friend bragged that he had stolen her from me. She had been cheating with him at least from the night I left, if not before. He resented me for falling in love with his fallback girl.

These may not have been his exact words. We were all teenagers, after all. Our affair started with cheating and reasonably ended the same way. It is long since water under the bridge, as teenagers are almost to a one awful and self-centered. Best to forgive the lot.

When I found out about my former best friend, I hated them both. I returned everything she had given me and cut them out of my life.

I spoke to to her once, years after. She worked at a jewelry shop down the street from my library job. She had graduated a college in Pennsylvania with an art degree. She talked about having worked at an erotic bakery. I thought we might be friends, but we weren't.

And that's it. I have nothing from that point on. She is not dead -- that information might have reached me -- but I don't know anything. She shares a common name with a famous author, rendering her difficult to google, so I do not care to try. I was only ever "kissing, but more so," a friend who shouldn't have been much more.

She is my only significant ex with whom I am in no contact. I am Facebook friends with the first girl I ever kissed, am proud of the woman who first tried in earnest to bed me for becoming a doula in Hawaii, have watched the babies of women I felt up for a few weeks grow into high school students, could quote my ex-fiancee's precocious child. I don't talk to most of them, though it is not a purposeful omission. There are twenty-seven girls with whom I was involved in some capacity (snogging at a concert counts as "involved in some capacity") from fourteen to thirty-eight, though most are compressed into the first four years. Of those, I could send a message to twenty-one and receive a reply within a couple of days, if not minutes. A few of those are close friends, two best friends, not counting my doting wife. There are few I don't wish happiness and most deserve it.

The subject of this entry may have had a point about my always having had a girlfriend.

Soon in Xenology: Sanity. Writing. Summer.

last watched: Angel: the Series
reading: Fast Times at Ridgemont High
listening: Damien Rice