by Esther Mills

Created on: September 06, 2009

I had three first kisses, or two first tries and one first kiss, depending on how you count things. The first try has been almost lost somewhere in the mist of elementary school, and was with a neighbor boy a few years younger than me. He had red hair and cried easily, and I played with him chiefly because he lived next door. As I lay on his plush backyard grass one evening he declared he would marry me, and because I was bored I told him we couldn't marry because married people had to kiss. He startled me by leaning over me and squashing his boyish lips hard and quick against my face, landing mostly on my chin. Itching for a grown-up experience, I tried to remember this miserable hit-and-run favorably.

The second was in tenth grade, with a boy I had determined to feel something for. He had fuzzy blonde hair, glasses thick as paperweights, and a brain the size of Massachusetts; he wasn't someone I had been pining for but he was a sweet friend to me, and in our claustrophobic private school he was the only boy who wanted to date me. I took a deep breath and hinted at interest, and by summer he had asked me to be his girlfriend. Sitting together in a tree on his farm, he asked if he could kiss me. The kiss, once it came, was a graze of lips, a shy touch with a hasty retreat, so that I was not sure if we had made contact or if it was only the warming of air between us I had felt. It was then I realized sadly the disparity between affection's warmth and attraction's heat.

The third (or, as I like to think of it, the real first kiss) came on the heels of the second, the summer I was seventeen. He was a man in his twenties whom I had been painfully aware of since I was fourteen, a handsome man with an all-American smile and a quiet, easygoing manner that drew people to him. Surprised by mutual feelings now that I was nearly grown, we had a chaste first date at his grandparents' farm and, in an odd deja vu, he asked to kiss me. This, however, was a kiss that made my veins sing. Lost in an eternal minute, we stood transfixed in our kiss while the wind tossed my hair about us; it had all the sweet passion of a movie scene, the camera spinning around us in dramatic sweeps. It was the kiss that launched my womanhood.

I married him.

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