Love Me: The Manoir

First Kiss Virgin

By fourteen, most people had engaged in the act of kissing. Tongues and saliva mixing, occasionally teeth bumping, messy and unruly kissing. I had not. As I would watch films (or more likely porn) I would study the way two people's lips would move together in natural synchronization and wonder how people just knew how to kiss. Had I missed a class on it?

The idea of kissing baffled me, and my own inexperience made me slowly hunch into myself when it came to talking with boys. My logic was that the minute the found out I didn't know how to kiss, they would back away slowly like they had learnt I had leprosy.  I entered a stage of my life where I remember having no flirtations at all. It didn't stop me pining after people.

When the school bus company that had gotten me home finally went bust, I began catching a number of buses home. This allowed me with more chances to meet boys than ever before - not that I ever spoke to them of course. A girl I would catch it home with knew some of them, and I would sit in silence with a sheepish smile on my face as they spoke. I fell into a week-long adoration for one of the boys - a ginger kid with a nice smile - who then abruptly ghosted me afterwards.

"Do you know [insert name of close friend] had her first kiss at the weekend?" someone told me while we were sat on the Astroturf waiting to start touch rugby.

It took me a minute to digest this information. Firstly, I was upset my friend hadn't told me. But sadly, I was more upset about the fact that I seemed to be losing a game that no one was competing against me with. But I saw it like a game, like Temple Run except for people were collecting kisses instead of coins. I was just falling off the sides of the walls.

***

People went to parties more, I was not invited. The closest I would get to rave would be dancing in the form rooms at lunchtime with the blinds pulled down until some teacher would tell us off for being too loud or using the Smartboard to create strobe lights. Instead, I would live through other people's experiences of parties until I felt like I had been there.

It was the same time I began to live vicariously through other people's sex lives as well. At fourteen the idea of kissing someone seemed years away, let alone having sex with them. I sat next to a girl in science with wide eyes as she told me about the things her and her boyfriend did. Looking back, these stories were always crude and probably exaggerated, but I didn't care. I felt compelled to absorb as much of it as I could, almost like I was preparing for the ultimate test.

Boys and boyfriends began to take over the narrative at lunchtimes. Having a boyfriend was still rather cool in my eyes, but it was less of a rare commodity than it had been previously. People seemed to pick them up so easily, and I would always question how they did it. Was there some secret shop that they all went to, one where they could hire or buy a boyfriend as easily as getting a bike?

My best friends began dating boys that I would meet once, and I would inevitably develop small crushes on those boys too simply because they were part of the male species that I had met. Crushes on teachers who weren't in the slightest bit attractive also became part of my daily school life, and on the whole I screamed of desperation.

What always strikes me looking back is that I barely thought about the actual relationship side. I couldn't imagine what normal dates would look like, how it would feel to hang out at the weekends or after school with the same person. Everything I knew about dating had been from experiences online, chatting to a boy for a couple of days and then watching as things slowly broke off.