First and really off.

Sometimes on drear, sodden days like today I find myself thinking of my first. With a mental linkage like that, how could these thoughts be anything less than completely salutary and convivial?

To set the stage, I met her in the course of working. I was in the grips of my first real taste of employment. Some sort of social law decrees that teenagers must do a tour of duty clad in unflattering synthetic fibers in an environment of vaporized grease and mildly abusive consumers impatient for the things to stuff into their gobs. It’s only natural in those conditions to develop some sense of uneasy camaraderie with fellow fast-food peons.

Somewhere along the line, my rising misanthropy and dewy-eyed innocence managed to catch her eye. Instead of the usual reaction of smiling and edging away to keep me at arm’s length, she sampled the unstable slurry of my adolescence and vowed I would be hers. If I had possessed even a whiff of insight, that should have been as much of a red flag as a fire dancing troupe performing on a zeppelin. It could only end with “Oh the humanity” I just didn’t know it yet.

For my part, I had as much chance of escaping her machinations as a quadriplegic armadillo has of dashing across a Texas interstate. I was unsuspecting and oblivious. She was slender, blonde, and possessed of a wit so acerbic it could have been used to remove corrosion from steel. She was also cuter than I was prepared to handle.

She waited until I came in to drop off my uniform and collect my final cheque. It was then that coincidently her tolerance for the job reached the breaking point. Right. But I was young and stupid, I spent about half an hour talking down the apparently upset woman before I offered her a ride home.

We were scarcely off the road and stopped in her driveway when she dropped the tac-nuke on my poor virgin ears; she told me flat out she wanted to fuck me right that minute. Oh yeah, I was a lamb galloping to the slaughter.

Thus began a torrid relationship of four months. It wouldn’t sink in until weeks later that she had some serious faults. Ah, how the broken girls love me as if I am their favorite form of emotional snack cake, filled with yummy angst crème. She leaned on me, filled my ears with protestations of how I was the only one who mattered. She gave me letter after letter proclaiming her lust for my body intertwined with avowals that I was the only thing holding her from a gruesome self-inflicted demise. I discovered her home life was grim and teetered on the edge of brutal. She was a cutter and the constant discovery of new rows of shallow razor cuts took a toll upon me. I agonized for weeks about dumping her, worried that calling it quits would push her over the edge. Eventually, it dawned on me that her blood would not be on my hands, it was her choice not mine if she did kill herself.

She was my first lover. Sometimes I wonder what happened to her in fit of morbid curiosity.