I was sixteen when I first kissed a girl. No, I mean really kissed a girl.

     We lined up lips, and did that curious shuffle you do with your feet at that age, and then she did the most amazing thing to me. She put her tongue in my mouth.

     Now, I'm not saying I was raised by nuns or anything. I knew the French kissed that way. But it seems to me looking back now, older, wiser, a man of the world no less, that it was such a pivotal moment in any young man's life. It was as if at that moment I stopped being a spectator at the sexual Olympics and was picked for the team.

     So I mumbled something stupid along the lines of can we do that again? and set to the task with such gusto that the poor girl could be forgiven in thinking she was kissing a haddock.

     Of course, when I told Bob Thompson about it in the schoolyard on the Monday morning he was singularly unimpressed. "Is that all you did?" he'd sneered. "You're a bit slow, aren't you? Susan Jones and me do much more than that. We do… everything."

     Such was my moment of triumph relegated in an instant to those places where doubts lurk. I spent the day wondering just what it was Bob Thompson and Susan Jones got up to. It pained me that my newfound kissing partner had not suggested that we did the same things too. I worried over things manly and hormonal. Was I really a bit slow?

     Bob Thompson grinned, wicked and knowing. And I had completely missed the pause between that euphemistic everything that supposedly he did, such was my preoccupation with my own inadequacies. Had I been thinking more clearly I'd have known that he and Susan did that curious shuffle, too, before their lips locked like long lost limpets.

     I grew a moustache. It seemed right and proper, a veritable beacon to my surging testosterone. It lurked upon my upper lip wayward and downy. The women could hardly fail to be impressed - and they were women, not girls, I was sure of that - even if it did soak up lemonade suds and cling doggedly to hamburger relish.

     It was then that I met Mary. She stood under the disco lights, swaying gently, intoxicated by the freshly inked decree absolute that poked from the pocket of her low cut blouse. That and the ten vodka tonics that swirled on her breath. Her tongue darted about mine in a different way to my first, innocent embrace. She attacked me with an urgency that was both alluring and frightening. She took me home - she had cushions just like my mother's - and she led me to the bedroom, her eyes glazed and dulled, her grip tight as if she feared I'd leap away out of the window.

     Shameful to say, I strutted before Bob Thompson in the schoolyard on that following Monday. But even then there was a part of me that knew I had lost something special in youth's impetuousness to give that specialty up. Puberty is a time of extremes. It is hard to think above the hormonal clatter.

     Now, I have a wonderful son and a lovely wife. She is not that first girl I kissed. She is not the divorcee that kissed me. We share the middle ground that only real maturity brings. But even now I wonder at that first pivotal kiss and that first frantic sex. Am I what I am because of all that, or in spite of it?

     I suppose age-old confusions are never really resolved. Think back to the trials and tribulations of your own youth. Who did you first kiss? Was it good? Is it better now?

     No, don't answer that. You'll just confuse me more. Let me enjoy my middle ground.

First published spring 2003 by Flashquake Magazine

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