Kissing

It is twenty years, today, since my first ‘real’ kiss. I was sixteen. I made sweet sixteen. Not through a lack of wishing I hadn’t though. The opportunity just didn’t arise before. I would never remember the exact date as a rule but for one thing: the green beer. We were out, at a bar in The Big Smoke, with the parents of friends. I realised this morning that it was twenty years, because… well… I’m 36. And good at maths.

Yes, you didn’t read me wrong, I did say green beer, we were celebrating St Patrick’s Day. . Served in 500 ml plastic beer tankards. Ugh. I am thankful to it, though. I was a shy teenager you see, having had little to do with boys. No brothers and an education at a prissy Girl’s School will do that to you. The (green) beer helped ‘bring me out of my shell’, allowing me to snog away happily, in front of the friend’s parents (cringe), a boy with a disturbing nickname.

He was a year younger than me (shock, horror… 15!) and shorter than me (not hard, being 5”11’) and I can’t actually remember if it was fun or not. We wrote to each other a couple of times after but it was not meant to be. It was sweet, innocent, and the beginning of a wonderful relationship of me and kissing. I love it. It took me until university to properly get the hang of it but when I did… there was no stopping me. I’ve experienced it all (well, some of it, I hope not really all, yet) – the washing machine, the inhibited, the wild, the innocent, the devilish, the unsolicited, the unwelcome, the gentle, the prohibited, the secret, the voracious, the ones that lead nowhere and the ones that lead everywhere…

Twenty years ago. Sheesh. When did I get so old?