My first kiss was empty, a grand disappointment. It took me years to recover.
For as long as I could remember, I had been anticipating kissing. I believed that a first kiss was a key to unlock a new realm of sensation. This belief propelled me through the darkest episodes of my childhood, because I knew that, even if life wasn’t appealing to me then, I couldn’t leave it without sampling sensuality, in hopes that, in it, I would find a pleasure strong enough to tether me to the earth, to make my continuity ‘worth it.’ One highschool afternoon, I found myself in the back of the library, alone with a male friend, in a position to kiss, experimentally. And, when it finally happened, I was so shocked to have felt nothing, I grew mute. I had nothing to say, because, after that, nothing interested me. Previously, I had only found sexuality interesting: It was the one thing I didn’t know. My doting parents would have given me absolutely anything, if only I had gotten out of bed and demonstrated a will-to-live. Unfortunately, sex was the one thing they couldn’t bribe me with and the only incentive that would have worked.
For years after, I tried to disprove my own lack of sensation, only to discover that it wasn’t just the first kiss, but all that proceeded it that lacked the transcendent, ineffable quality that could have saved me. Again and again, I felt nothing. A long procession of nothing. One mouth was just as hollow as the next.
I had no idea I liked being hit, until it happened.
You hit me. And it was like the swiftest, most extreme delivery of attention. No one, before you, had ever thought to remind me that I was really there, I realized.
And in the stinging of my skin, I finally felt my own presence. My cheeks flushed with presence. Blood surged, and I could feel it humming. Meanwhile, deep in my subconscious, a switch flicked- and, for the first time, I felt loved. But it wasn’t love. At least, for you, it wasn’t love.
Wonderful argument for corporal punishment of children