First Love

[ChrisLovesYou]

I don't go on dates much anymore, but I think I can remember the last one. It was late at night, and she turned to me and said something really sexy to me like, 'I think I'm a little drunk,' then shuddered like she could keel from alcohol poisoning at any moment. I left before she started to puke, or maybe I was the one who started puking. Anyway, I ended up back in my room and had to make a bashful face when I saw her walking around campus later that week.

For a long time, that episode haunted me in a strange sort of way. I would lie in bed at night thinking about it, trying to figure out why I was thinking about it. That one time, with that one dumb girl - and as I thought about it in my mind, it turned into many times with many girls, going back years and years into my personal history leading up to that one moment of catharsis. I spent many nights trying to follow that line back to the start, trying to figure out where things had curdled.

I thought about my first love. It was inspecific, I guess, in that I liked a lot of girls at the time, but there was something about it, some sort of intense emotion that defied description, that seemed to fade as time went on. It was like a warm glow rising out from the pit of my stomach into the air that wrapped around everything, reminding me that if I didn’t get this girl’s attention I was gonna die, and if I did happen to get her attention, and if I did happen to end up taking her into my arms and she would put her head on my shoulder in just such a way, I was gonna die in that case, too, instantly, but it was going to be much nicer.

Over time, eventually, girls would end up in my arms and I thought I was gonna die but I never did. That’s when the warm glow seemed to turn down and I walked around from classroom to classroom and I still liked girls, but it was more of a mental exercise of determining whether she was pretty and smart enough instead of that first-glance lightning strike that burnt my heart up when I was, oh God, twelve or thirteen.

Some time ago, I was attending school in Korea. Again, I floated from classroom to classroom and I still liked girls, but these girls were afraid of me because they knew Western boys were very physical like they’d seen in the movies. Every day at around four o’clock I’d try to take the long way from the school to the subway station. My school was on the side of a mountain and the alleyways around it would give you vertigo. It was rapturous.

My high school shared a big dusty exercise yard with an all-girls middle school across the way. Whenever I’d walk across the yard at lunchtime, there would be a gaggle of fourteen year-olds gawking at me. All the pop-stars on TV were long-haired, androgynous Asian fairy boys, as was the fashion at the time, but I managed to capture their attention somehow. They would shoud ‘hi!’ behind my back as I walked by and I would wave and they would wig out. It really was rapturous.

One day on my walk down the hill I was just past the fifth or sixth pharmacy on my route - almost there - when I heard the sound of panting and footsteps behind me. I looked over my shoulder and there was a girl in the white shirt and matching navy vest and skirt that the middle schoolers wore. Her bangs were a mess on her forehead and she looked tired. I thought nothing of it and was about to go down the steps of Choryang station when she stopped me.

She started talking to me - in English, of course, perfect English - explaining to me that she had been following me and that I was oh-so-very handsome and, well, where are you from and why are you going to that school? I explained myself and she told me I was handsome again and we traded phone numbers. I walked down the subway steps into the damp underground and I had no idea what had just happened, but I felt really cool.

On that very weekend she called me up while I was out with some other friends. She told me she called because - well, she just wanted to hear my voice. And she kept using this word - this is where the translation gets sketchy, and maybe the story gets a little weird - she kept calling me oppa. Now, a young girl, in Korean, calls her older brother by that name, but it also applies to girls talking to older boyfriends. Now, that had always rubbed off on me as being a little sexist, a little kinky, but dammit, hearing it in that way for the first time, my heart went all dugeun-dugeun.

I promised the next day I would take her out for ice cream. We ended up meeting by our schools, since that was the only location in town we both knew. I got off the bus and I saw her standing there. She wrapped her arm around mine and we started walking together. We went to Dunkin Donuts since there were no ice cream places in the neighbourhood. It was alright.

I got this heart-shaped donut that I would always get when I went to Dunkin - the right ventricle was full of cream and the left ventricle was full of jelly, and they covered it in pink icing. It was delicious. I still wasn’t completely sure about this girl; I thought maybe she wanted English lessons from me, but on the sly. I had heard that kind of thing happened to dumber whiteboys who didn’t know how to swing it with Korean women. At any rate, I told her I was bad at English because I wasn’t really canadian but Quebecois. She didn’t seem to care. She asked me where I lived. I named the subway stop, and it was hers too, right across town. In the late afternoon we rode back together. She rested her head on my shoulder and I was so glad we had met up so far from our neighbourhood.

From then on, around four o’clock she would text me to ask if my school was done yet, and when it was we would meet outside and walk home together, and her friends would make a scene and I didn’t care. We would ride the subway together forever. She would point to some girls sitting down the car and ask me if I understood what they were saying. Obviously, I didn’t, and she would tell me they were talking about how handsome I was and then casually mention how upset that was making her. That would be the cue to stand closer to her. Another time some of my friends from taekwondo came on the train and saw us. I hadn’t even mentioned her to anyone. They asked her if she was Japanese and she got upset.

The cutest thing she ever did, though, was one time I was walking her to the pedestrian overpass where we’d seperate. It was dark out already, and we were standing there under the streetlamp. I was about to leave when she stopped me - ‘oh, what’s that?’ she said, touching something on my face. I thought I had cut myself. She leaned in closer and kissed me. Now, this, I would say, was a great moment in the history of feminism in Korea because this was a young girl asserting herself and making a move on an older foreign boy. I got that warm feeling around me again and she said she loved only me.

Now, the question on your mind, I’m sure, is how did it end? Well, things did sort of cool off after a while, and I felt guilty that she was younger than me and of a different race, and she ended up graduating from middle school and going to a different school in another part of town, and all that sort of came together and we ended up not seeing much of eachother ever again.

I hope to God that kind of romance doesn’t happen but once in a lifetime and maybe again some crazy-talking girl will come out of nowhere and sweep me off my feet and there will be jelly donuts and long train rides and cute uniforms or something equally cool to fill my mind and leave me warm and tired, because life is too long for one chance at that kind of love.

And I hope she knows I miss her.

[mere1975]

I'm glad this was the second story I read today. I think it will make it a really good Thursday. Thanks!!

- Mere "first story was about a congresswoman who hung up on Obama twice because she thought he was prank calling her" 1975

[Irock]

I really liked that story, but it makes all the (2) teenage relationships I had seem sorted and - well, "American" I guess.

i "In Korea I'm a ho."rock