revisionist history

So I have this old friend, and I saw him last night like I have seen him before, like I have been seeing him for two shards shy of twenty years. His eyes are cerrulean and his fingers are tapered, he's got pigeon toed punk rock in his gait and a timber in his voice that used to make me curl around the cradle of the telephone. For years and years of passwords and shifting addresses and bank account numbers and social security numbers and passports and flight times and gates and foreign currency and I could always pull his parent's phone number from my addled brain like a white rabbit from a top hat. Just like an incantation. Just like good medicine, the three parts simple syrup to one part spinal fluid.

And then time stretches and contorts. It gets all silly putty and newsprint, and the soft spots get hard and the hard parts get soft, and you just keep going ass over tea kettle because velocity is a bitch of an autocratic taskmaster.

So there you are sort of all grown up, in a downtown restaurant drinking rose with the very first manchild you would ever really love, and you let his voice rain down and into your ears and out your pores like sharp tinkle of shattering crystal.

You never really can ever fall in love for the first time ever again. You can love deeper and you can love better, but nothing could ever be like that first time, a pair of unravaged hearts and the audacity of innocense, beat-up cars running on guile, borrowed bedrooms when lucky, summer warmed cemetaries by default.

I was, of course, a precocious nincompoop. I had wanted Blue Eyes since I had seen him on his skate board in the summer before I started my freshman year, I could see the sparkle across the parking lot, and I longed to kiss it's nose. He was, of course, my inattainable bliss, I was two years younger and I thought hopelessly not cool enough. I can still remember exactly what I was wearing the first day that we spoke as in prelude to a phone number -- all perfectly orchestrated and calabrated by the shadowy network of the highschool cabal. What was I wearing? It was 1986, I had on a pair of mauve cut off sweat pants and a white hoodie and my hair was longish and still my real blond, it was late spring. What I remember is directly after the exchange of numbers I was feeling so credulous and also hot in every sense of the word that I turned right around and walked directly into the nearest pole. And could have died on the spot.

So we had a heady summer of making out, of haints on motorcycles, rattlesnake winecoolers and the real, raw flush of love.

But before we could get there, because intuition told me I was going there, there was a certain little state I needed to divest myself of. Because really, how cool is a virgin. So I thought. Because in the throes of love and I didn't want to be fumbling and bumbling, I wanted to be competent, I wanted to be experienced.

Many years later when I finally shamefacedly told the tale, he told me how much he would have liked to have been my first. So let that be a lesson to all virgins, everywhere

And on the Saturday before Halloween on a warm evening of ghouls and shimmer we are revising history over spring rolls, because by rights he should have been and was my first, and we agree that dint of administrative oversight I get to be his and he get's to be mine.

And so all is well and momentarly right in the world until reason is deserted in the far corner of a crowded bar and I wake up, having skirted propriety, but having toed a certain discretionary line, to find him on my side of the bed. As if I were seventeen, with my own apartment and a bigger bank account.

Except that we are not kids in cars anymore we are nominally adults and therefore are Not Supposed to Fuck Around or engage in behavior that is damaging to other's and to ourselves, toed lines be damned, ethically we are still in the same boat as Rush Limbaugh with his loofah.

So we were civilised, and went to the museum, and used rad as a modifier and descriptive adjective far too often, but some habits are hard to break.

*and I know I am garnering some serious karmic juju, he just happens to be raddest kisser ever. It's like summertime and highschool. But mostly it's like kissing back to innocence the first and very last kiss without the excess of expectation. The fun of it, the art of it, without artifice, the sport of it. Who makes out until dawn these days -- we did. And that I really don't regret.