First Love, First Lie, First Kiss, First Try

[Doreen Peri]

(reposted from the Love Stories thread)


I was six years old in first grade or was I five in kindergarten? I was barely there to comprehend the difference between my skin and air. I was attempting to determine where I left off and the universe began. It was only months after I had ventured from the safety of the foyer to the porch.

My first lie.

"Did you go outside?," she asked. "No.," I said, the bookcase headboard of my bed stacked with get well greetings, me, on knees playing with care packages, all the others outside running loose, ponies, unsaddled, tricycle queens and jacks of hearts held to spokes by wooden clothes pins, metal bars about to spring the rig, all for the sound of ...........brrrrrrrrrrrmmmmmmmmm...... burrrrrrummmmmm.

Sun rays teased me into the first lie, each arc of a prism meeting me eye-to-eye beneath a door and between blindslats. Prison couldn't hold me. I escaped. Six or five, barely alive enough to know the difference between spring and fall. Winter was my nemesis. I named myself buried beneath covers, wool, cotton, blends of color and fabric, trapped in shallow breath. I had spent summers in oxygen tents already while dance was being choreographed without my permission.

Love is often not a gentle thing.
Love can be too owned.

And so my mother claimed me in her prison. Dust could not be breathed. Every inch, each corner, every minute crevice needed clearing out. Debris would put me in a life-or-death demise and at my size, possibilities were most likely perilous. Just as an iris brings forth a pierce of iris leaves up through surface soil, a child is owned by limitations. Bulbs are made to break through barriers with stem, but then again, there is a certain timing to the bloom.

I told my first fib. I ventured out of the vestibule to breathe freedom. I should have told the truth. I should have said yes, I went. But I didn't.

It had to have been only months later. Age is something so relative, it's difficult to imagine the percentage when one year is all of a fifth or sixth of your entire live. Mathematics is relentless. I will never understand equations which cause a miniscule existence to become such a large percentage of a whole.

But all told, I weighed in with another few months and without much further ado or contemplation of do or die, I proceeded to public education.

Ok, so there we were like sitting around in the same class and all and we were making lists, no shit, lists! At six! Lists of who we liked and why. Which guys were hot and which were not and it was like way strange because they housed us in an alternative place because there was construction going on and all the buses had different routes than they used to when they first started out and changes like this were way big at six. Changes like this were huge to me, anyway, because the way the sun hit the pavement was different every day when I woke up and I knew then that the world was turning too quick for me to keep up.

I lived on Napier Street. There were only a few houses on the block. Ten, maybe, twelve, maybe fifteen. It's very easy to visualize it in my memory dream but I wouldn't want to be quoted when it came to actual history. Richard lived down the street. His father came out to help organize and referree kick-ball and softball and dogeball games, sometimes Greek Dodge. Richard's son apparently got hit by the dude that ran the miniature golf place a few miles down the road. The news shut it down. No more ferris wheels and loop-de-loops, no more paper mache games.

One block over was Olympus Street which was at an angle so steep I ran my bike into the big blue mailbox at the bottom of the street when a cocker spaniel came yapping and biting at my feet when I was like ten or so.

But that's going forward. Let's back up.

David lived on Olympus Street. I was six. He was six or seven or five. It's hard to remember all this stuff when I was barely alive enough to know where my skin ended and the universe started or the other way around and maybe I said this already. It's extremely difficult to remember everything but I do know that David had eyes that were the size of heaven and a heart that was a part of my soul! Both were baby blue with speckles of intrigue. Both were conceivable. Longed for.

Well, David and I were like really close friends in the small mind of a six-year-old which i had and I loved him more than naptime which was my favorite escape because of the blankets so easily placed just so far from each other so everyone was comfortable. Miss Nordeen gave us graham crackers and we had time to practice square dance and reel-to-reel. Yes, I know her name rhymes with mine now. I didn't plan that, though. It's all true.

David's eyes were so blue it was like I was looking at the sky of God when I looked into them.

And so one day when we were in between playtime and blankets of silence and boys were split into another category from girls so they could build stuff with blocks and we girls could cook stuff on make-believe stage sets, David found me in the hallway as I was trying to find my coat or my mother or my sneakers and he kissed me on the cheek and then......... on the lips. I melted on the linoleum, spread out in a doe-si-doe, ready to promenade.

This was my first try. I'll tell you what happened next.

A few months later, I rode home on the bus with David and Mary. Mary was my best friend. She was six like me. And David. I don't know what I did wrong. I don't know what provoked David to walk Mary home from school to her house right across the street from mine on Napier Street when he lived a whole block away on Olympus Street which was a steep street where I had wrecked my bike a few years later into the mailbox when the cocker spaniel yapped and bit at my heels which scared the livin' shit outa me and made me crawl into my music and pretend to practice piano every day for days and months on end, but damnit......

I'm so embarrased.

David walked her home and left me walking behind a few feet when he usually had walked me home every day all year even though he lived a block away and it was out of his way to do it but this time, he was walking Mary home and I got very upset and apparently, according to my mother who watched the entire thing out of the nineteen sixty living room picture window, hit David in the arm with my fist and screamed at Mary and said, "WHAT is going ON here? WHY are you walking HER home? What are you DOING? I don't UNDERSTAND!"

And then I went back inside, my first dealing with guilt right on the heels of my very first confrontation with what was truly my very first lie and then I went back inside both times and here I am still and y'know what? I don't miss David that much but he sure taught me a lesson.

First love, first kiss, first try, first lie or some kind of cycle like that.

What did he teach me? What's the lesson? You tell me, OK?
I would be happy to know any answer you'd say.

[stilltrucking]

women can be such shits to each other,
maybe that is what he was trying to teach you

I like it anyplace you put it, dam that didn't come out right


let put it this way


man I like this one a lot I hope it ain't done yet, I could do with some more

meanwhile thankyou














Kate Moses she is making a pretty good living from the Sylvia Plath Suicide Doll Industry.