Boys and Girls
I don’t think I was one of those girls with “daddy” issues. But for some reason I chose to be one of those girls with a perpetual older boyfriend. It sounds snotty to say I was mature for my age, but I was (hair flip). I spent most of my teenage years biding my time until I could finally fly the coup. Maybe I thought older boys were my ticket out of town, maybe I hated being alone, maybe I liked being the sole focus of someone’s attention, or maybe I didn’t want to bother making BFF girlfriends. I still haven’t really cracked the case, but the fact remains that I have not really been “single” for any significant period of time since I was 13 years old. The following is a list of the boys I busied myself with over the years. There were other flings here and there, but these are the “landmark” fellows. Please keep in mind while reading (and this is no excuse) that when measured against the girls I grew up with and the town I grew up in, my antics were relatively normal, if not vanilla. If you come from a dirty little town, you tend to do dirty little things to pass the time. The thing that makes me sad is this: all these guys, with the exception of one, genuinely loved me. But for some reason, I repeated the pattern of slowly making them suffer until I was ready to try something else. I was a man-eater and I didn’t even know it. The thing that makes me even more sad is this: if I wouldn’t have been so scared of being alone, and if I would have actually tried spending any amount of time getting to know myself, I may have realized I didn’t need them to fill in some imaginary hole in my life, thereby preventing years of pain and suffering for all parties involved. I won’t make assumptions that any of these guys even care about my wrong-doings at this point, but I do still carry with me the residual guilt of being such a dishonest person and the shame of being so horrible to people who loved me. Not to mention I am embarrassed for being somewhat of a teenage hoe-bag.
John: He was about 16, I was about 13, and my mom was about to shit a brick. This guy had no business being with someone my age, but in his defense, someone my age had no business being at the party where we first met. We clung to each other for a couple years, me for the reasons listed above, him for reasons having to do with trying to take my virginity, bless his heart. J/k, he really loved me, I think. Due to my parents‘ legitimate concern over our relationship, I somehow found myself turning into some sort of secret agent in order to spend time with him and experiment with the sensations I was having between my legs. Sometimes I look back on my time with John and I am repulsed. I think I may have given him a blow job in the back of a church van, but the memory is fuzzy due to years of trying to block it out. Other times, I find a sweet little silver lining of tenderness. Many nights I found myself scooting down the hallway stairs one-by-one on my butt so the floorboards wouldn’t creak, then slipping out of the garage door into the night where John would be waiting at the school across the street. He spread out blankets and we would lay there under the vast black starry sky keeping each other warm and listening only to the sounds of a train rolling through town every half hour. Even though it was a wildly inappropriate relationship, those particular memories remain clear in my mind and I think of them fondly.
Check back next week for Boys and Girls - Part 2