damonjustisntfunny.com

I have few memories of talking with Ben about kissing. Perhaps it is not important to him either. We talked on a good many other subjects: girls — oh yes — but kissing: no. This was probably because I had no experience in the matter and, if Ben did, he didn’t want me to find another way in which I didn’t measure up. Plus, at the age of nine, kissing seemed so blasé — so second grade. Sex was all we talked about. Though either of us would have done well to have had a good snog.

Ben got around to it much quicker than I — but it was that way with most things. I don’t resent him for it; that’s why I keep him around: I learn well from the mistakes of others and Ben’s life path has proven to be more than sufficient for providing me with a graduate level of study on the art of relationships. Plus: he is amusing and very few people can understand him when he talks and this gives me some pleasure.

Oh: in the second grade I did kiss a boy a few times. His name was Matthew. The only reason I remember his name is because my mother recently found a book that I had been given for my birthday on or about the time I was in the second grade. The story was about myself and three of my friends and our spaceship. It is rather clever: our names are printed in the text of the story as if it were actually about us. The names of my friends in the book were: Chanda, Luke, and Matthew. I remembered who Chanda was immediately because I had wanted to kiss her one summer during which we stayed up the entire night talking until morning came; and I remembered Luke because my parents stopped letting me visit his house after his parents repeatedly failed to see how allowing us to smoke cigarettes and play unsupervised with sharp objects should be of concern to them; but I couldn’t remember Matthew. Until just now. That second grade bit jogged my memory. I remember kissing him in the room in which we took French lessons (which is fairly ironic, in retrospect). We were going to get married.

Obviously that didn’t work out.

And, as that we were living in the Midwest at that time in the early eighties, our relationship really didn’t stand much of a chance of surviving the second grade. In fact: I’m not sure if Matthew even survived the second grade. While he was certainly better looking, I was bigger and harder to beat up. He might have been taken out behind some cow shed or buried in some corn field. That is, if he didn’t escape first. We may not have had an actual rocket ship like we did in my birthday book — which goes to show you that you can’t trust anything you read (or are given on your birthday) — but everyone wants to fly away from the Midwest. But still I was the lucky one: my family moved to New England.

I hope he is all right. I wonder if he ever thinks of me. I hadn’t thought of him at all. Until now.

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