I remember those days before sex was required in a relationship. I even recall those days when I was too shy to kiss my girlfriend. She was very dark, very beautiful, very hard, very thick, very graceful, and very smart. She was in the 8th grade and I was in the 7th and one day she began telling her friends at school that I was her boyfriend. She was so shapely and so popular that I couldn’t disagree, thus our relationship became official. But then what is a 13-year-old boy supposed to do with his girlfriend when he only sees her at school?
I knew what my friends wanted me to do to her. The same thing that they claimed to do with their girlfriends but I didn’t really want to. For some reason it seemed like such a rather vile thing to do to a girl who I actually liked. So I walked her to class. I waddled behind her while wrapping my arms around the front of her ribcage, like teenage boys tend to do with their girlfriends, and I placed myself against her perfectly rotund backside. That may have well been sex because that was as far as we ever took it. I enjoyed telling my friends that she belonged to me. I enjoyed her glances and stares from across the hallway. I loved the way she used to gel her hair back over a scrungy in a style the girls used to call “a freeze.”
Her image would come to me at night and I so appreciated how she always pleased me in my dreams so that I would wake up sticky and excited. I saved the gum wrapper that she wrote her number on even though I had known it by heart for months (568-8125). I bought her a Jessica Rabbit card for Valentines Day and I even let her wear my San Jose Sharks Starter jacket a few times during the winter. To say that I was enamored would be an understatement.
To be able to transcend a crush and actually attain a girlfriend as an adolescent boy was sweeter than life itself. This was before pregnancies, before heartache, before trauma, before pressure, before infidelity, before promiscuity; this was before the corrosive power of sex. This was before the fall.
YB
That’s a good memory friend. The 568 prefix alone brought back memories of all my deep east friends I had. peace.
…I have to ask though, what made you insert that art piece? It doesn’t seem to connect with the innocent years you write of.
Ha ha ha. Yeah buddy. I’m sure you know about that 633 prefix too, lol. Naw I just added that artwork to reference the biblical idea of The Fall. Also to throw people off a little bit. I’m glad it worked, lol.