For this week’s Sunday list (or should I say, Sunday Kissed!) the great and varied contributors to Entropy share tales of the first time they locked lips with another human. I love/hate the squeamish overshare feeling and was cringing and giggling about this all week.
Note #1: If you’re still feeling unsure of how to kiss after all this, check out “How to kiss and cuddle with your boyfriend” on Wikihow [http://www.wikihow.com/Kiss-and-Cuddle-With-Your-Boyfriend]
Note #2: Scrolling through pages upon pages of Google Image search results for “kissing” has the same effect as saying a single word, such as “toilet” over and over again. Kissing as visual babble.
Kari Larsen:
Before I dated my first “real” boyfriend, I had a crush on his best friend. We hung out one day, all three of us. I don’t remember kissing him, but I do remember that he was sick and, after we kissed, he came down with something pretty severe — and so did my other friend, the guy I later dated. Maybe they kissed, and I’m remembering it all wrong? I didn’t get sick.
Byron Campbell:
I had been dating this girl for about a week, and she was about to leave for a trip to New York that would last another whole week! Clearly, I was in danger of being dumped–all that time to reconsider the relationship and realize her mistakes. So when she invited me to the Harry Potter movie premier, I gladly accepted, even though I had a marching band performance that evening. We waited in line for several hours before the theater opened (I hadn’t even read Harry Potter) and then while her friends held the spot in line, we went for a walk around the block–she thought she had spotted the back of Samuel Jackson’s head. We stopped at the park and the kiss happened. It was about as awkward as you can imagine–she was a good foot taller than I was, I was trying to do closed-mouth while she was going for tongue, and we banged teeth a few times. After the movie, we went to Carrows, where my band director was also eating…I had to do 300 pushups, but it was SO worth it.
Nicholas Grider:
I have never been romantically kissed. It’s been offered but I have declined. It’s gross. It’s like an elementary school gets flooded by a septic tank and then you head in there and rub your face on the wet carpet. The kiss I can recall as being life-changing or memorable is not romantic, it’s when, after watching my mom take her last breath in the hospice and the nurse came in to pronounce her, I was still holding her hand but I stood and leaned over her and kissed her on her forehead, gently, once, to say thank you, to say I love you, to say goodbye.
Jeremy Hight:
First kiss..9th grade….she wrote poems on my skin in English class …backwards in smeary Bic…told me to wait till I got home to read….she was my best friend….at times the butterflies were like I was not even there…….then her parents got divorced…..she had to move 3 states away…..we sat all afternoon that day at the end of school in her parents’ empty house…long silences…awkward chats about tiny things…..then she smiled and we held hands for the first time as the sun crossed a cloud and emerged brighter somehow….I leaned over and missed her mouth….kissing her shoulder and almost falling off the back steps
Henry Hoke:
I can’t really remember, it might have been on a tennis court at night, or in a chicken coop, or when I was four and after the kiss the mom ran up from behind and threw me on the ground and beat my ass, either way now I look over my left shoulder every time time I’m gonna kiss someone, just to be safe.
Kristen Stone:
When I was 15 I went to a Unitarian Universalist sleep away camp in North Carolina. My best friend had gone the year before and assured me that EVERYBODY hooked up at camp so I was sure to get my first kiss. It seemed imperative that it happen soon. The last couple days of camp I started hanging out with this boy named Jack who wore the same tie-dye shirt everyday. We bonded over masturbation jokes in the back of the camp van on the way back from a rafting trip. When he said goodbye to me as I was leaving on the last morning I knew it was coming, he kissed me weirdly on the side of my mouth.
Robert Vaughan:
I was in 7th grade and we had practicing sessions at my friends place. Then Dorothy asked me over, it was night. I rode my bike there. We sat on an awkward split rail fence outside their trailer park and she taught me how to use my tongue. I had splinters in my ass that hurt so much from the bicycle seat on the way home
Barrett Warner:
New Orleans. 1980. “Come here,” Liz said. “I want to show you something.” I spun around a corner with her. She gathered me close. Her face so close to mine. We kissed. My lips softened. Now hers. We didn’t break from each other, but took the smallest breaths, swallowed small sips of spit. Hers. Mine. Then she drew back. I took her arm. We walked that way to Flaneur on Royal Street where she shook free of me. Weeks later I still cried about it, so thrilling, so brief.
Alex Kalamaroff:
Jacqueline Moyer. 5th grade. Her basement. Listening to “Got You (Where I Want You)” by The Flys. The memory still makes me squirm.
Sara Finnerty Turgeon:
I was 14 and I wanted my first kiss to be under the blue whale at the Museum of Natural History, because I felt I WAS the blue whale. He was 21 and I met him on the “internet” because as a very strange child of the 90’s that is where I found my romance. We were too nervous to kiss there, but ended up kissing in front of a window that overlooked Central Park in the dinosaur rooms. Soon after, his sister found out I was 14 and she made him break up with me. I didn’t see what the big deal was. (!!!!!!!!!!!!) I didn’t really care, though, because he was a smoker and I was a child and children think smoking is gross. Two years later I started smoking, obviously. But age aside, he was very kind to me and I have nothing but good memories of him. Great first kiss.
Kristen Stone:
Here’s my second…in my 10th grade chemistry class (and also in the drama club) there was this loud girl who liked to flirt with me– probably more for the shock value than anything else. I really really wanted to kiss a girl (/kiss anyone who was less awkward than Summer Camp Jack, see above) so I convinced her to “teach me how” to kiss. This is so embarrassing, but I was fifteen. We talked about it all week on the phone, made a plan. Nobody had a car. On Saturday my mom dropped me off at her house to hang out. She was wearing brown corduroy pants and a red t-shirt that said “Coca-Cola” in Arabic. She had a gap between her front teeth and greasy hair. She sat in a black faux leather computer chair. We giggled at each other for awhile. She touched my face. I remember it all very well. Afterwards I had to go to the grocery store with my mom and all I could think about was kissing, a sick thrill in my stomach. (Somewhere I still have a picture of her from that day, taken with one of those yellow and black Kodak disposable camera.)
Henry Hoke:
My second kiss, I missed. It was very, very dark.
