First Kiss

In junior high in 1982, the highlight of my year was one week in the Santa Cruz mountains of Northern California. It’s where I fell in love with the smells of clean dirt and pine needles. My outstretched arms tried to embrace the night sky without the noise and light pollution of the years spent in Los Angeles. I feasted on stars, campfires, and midnight giggles in the girls’ cabins with the appetite of a teenage boy. I couldn’t get enough.

And speaking of teenage boys, they were there, too.

Amber, my partner in crime that week was more bold than me. She separated her eyelashes after applying mascara with an unhooked safety pin. She wanted to marry Billy Idol, and we bonded over our admiration for bad boys. That summer, Geoff came to Mount Cross. Geoff was the bad boy because all the girls liked him, even the counselors. He wore his brunette hair down to his shoulders and Amber and I chased him for just one smile. We snuck around corners to snap his picture. In the 80s, we had to wait to see our developed film and only hope it didn’t come out blurry. I can still see that snapshot in my mind’s eye…Geoff sitting outside the snack, shack smiling and laughing with a girl I somehow knew was much prettier than me.

Amber and I lamented his inattention and headed to the last campfire of the week ready to say goodbye to our crush until next year.

The irony of Christian camp is their goal is to get kids close to God. But if you put young adolescents together under the stars and around a campfire, it doesn’t matter that you’re singing, “Sing Your Praise to the Lord.” Eyes connect across the flames. Girls (and some boys, I’m guessing) are falling in love with the hot guitar player who’s in college and vowing their future husband will have to be a musician. Sexual awakening is what is meant to happen at that age, and a camping experience hardly helps kids ignore that part of themselves.

Chasing Geoff all week meant I was oblivious to who might have been chasing me. Amber wasn’t. “David’s checking you out,” she whispered while elbowing me in the ribs. Sure enough, across the sparks of the fire, he winked at me, and I felt the shiver. Geoff, who? It was the last night of summer camp. Anything, and everything was possible. It was a night to make history and make history we did

“Sing your praise to the Lord!” The ecstasy of worship and guitars quickly translated to letting this boy I barely knew grab my hand and lead me toward a grove of pine trees.

Is there anything more magical than someone’s hand tenderly in our hair leaning in with confidence? I was lucky to have a good first kiss. I am well aware this isn’t the case for many. But for almost all of us, we remember in our cells our early sexual experiences. I still remember he wore braces, lived in Fresno, and the slight and sweet coldness of his open mouth.

Somehow it ended there. Amber’s and my giggles switched to whispers that night as we discussed and dissected what had happened. “What did it taste like?” Amber asked. “Amber!”. I responded with pretend shock.

I told her all the details, of course. But something new bloomed in my chest. I had experienced an enclosure of intimacy that was now uniquely my own, a place others couldn’t enter. Even David couldn’t because it was my story. My story to inflate, downplay, share, and treasure, whatever I chose it to be.

Summer camp wrapped my first kiss in a magical blanket. Poor David. I wrote to him once a week for about three months but never got a response. When I developed my roll of film, I still tacked Geoff’s picture up on my bulletin board. It took the sting out a little bit. Doesn’t a first kiss equal death do us part? I guess David thought otherwise.

Despite my first kiss’s idyllic setting, I think it’s safe to say that no matter what one’s sexual awakening went like, it’s a tumble and mishmash of sensations and memories. I understand that even when sexual abuse happens to a child, there’s remaining guilt because a part of it feels good. I am thankful my bittersweetness only included unanswered letters with a mostly anonymous boy. As a 50-year-old woman, it remains a sweet memory.

I don’t remember all my first kisses, but I remember the ones that mattered.

What details do you remember about your first kisses? Where were you? Mine involved a lot of tenderness. Maybe yours, not so much. Anything you want to share?

Who we are as sexual beings is so vital to our stories and humanity. Would you consider writing about it? If not, just let me know. Would your thirteen-year-old self consider Bily Idol sexy?