Was I four? Honestly, I can’t remember the very moment I was certain…it kind of just happened underneath a bed with a neighbor girl telling me to close my eyes. In a tangle of darkness and dust bunnies, I felt her lips press against mine. I finally opened my eyes and I guess at the time I didn’t understand what the whirlwind in my stomach meant. She simply smiled and silently slipped back into the surface and left me with this memory.
If I were to frame my moments and hang them before me I still couldn’t point a finger and say, “That’s when it happened!”
I’m not sure if anything ever happened…was something supposed to happen?
The sum of my last fifteen years point back down to Andes Street…had it never been for that faithful September afternoon at 1212 Andes I might of never found myself in the smoky rooms of the Old Plantation.
The Old Plantation was the reason I wore a turtleneck for the entire of two weeks. I didn’t even know her name. She just said, “Hey cutie, you wanna go out with me! I guess I was eager to lose a little bit of the green at the old age of 18. So I smiled and followed her out into her red Mercury. Once inside, my eyes fixed on the bright glowing moon hanging just in the corner of her windshield. She quickly found my lips and all I could hear was the smacking noise of saliva, tongues and teeth. This was my first kiss and inside I cringed.
He said he fell in love with me. I didn’t understand how such a thing could happen to a drag queen. I just smiled and held his hand as we walked across the university campus while the deep base of male voices shouted, “Faggots!”
