The Book Post

A Tale of First Love.

On Valentine's Day - the annual zenith of romantic notions for some - I offer this amusing tale of romantic awakening and failed first love, complete with Air Supply ballads, skateboarding and love dragons. It is an embarrassing confessional, really. This story was published in the anthology Some Girls Do - My Life As A Teenager to raise funds for SISTER2Sister- a mentor program for disadvantaged teenage girls.

This is the story of the summer my hormones first got the better of me....

* I FOUND my first glimpse of love during the long sunny days of an Indian summer in the quiet suburbs of the Canadian town of my birth.
It was the summer of 1986 and the world as I knew it was an idyllic paradise. The air was clean, the trees had not been cut down, and there was no such thing as September 11, AIDS, spam, mobile phones, the war in Iraq or Paris Hilton.

I was blissfully unaware of the issues of debt and poverty, so much so that in a school essay that year I described my lower-middle-class family as being wealthy, much to the horror of my mother who tried to explain that she did stock take after hours at cut-rate department store Zellers and my sister and I wore hand-me-down clothes with patches on the knees and elbows precisely because we were not what people called wealthy.

I had no idea that in some other place people might have more than we did or, in fact, much less. It seemed there was not a care in the world.

Then I had to go and discover boys.

I was one of those girls who did everything early. By all accounts I was born with a full head of hair and legs that hung over the edge of the bed in the maternity ward, pretty much fully formed into my current self, probably with a martini in one hand.

I took my first steps at nine months, was a connoisseur of Stephen King horror novels by 10 years, and stole a Playgirl magazine and taped the centrefold up in the girls' toilets by11.

I guess it was no surprise then that I first fell in love at 12; or, more accurately, fell in puppy love....

In 1986 my best friends were Theresa, Dahlia and a tall, freckled, red-haired boy named Benjamin. We each lived within four leafy suburban blocks of one another and we were inseparable. We rode banana-seat bicycles, built a go-kart, discovered rollerskates you could strap on to your high-top runners, and climbed the cliffs around the rocky Canadian beaches like billygoats.

Time stretched on in a way I have not been able to manipulate the clock since. Blissful afternoons dissolved into long sunny evenings. Days melted one into the next.

There were no schoolbooks or teachers, responsibilities or cares. Being three tomboyish girls and one boy, we were blissfully unaware of the implications of relationships, gender and sex, let alone our own heartaches to come.

And then one evening, after running around like puppies until we fell exhausted into a heap on the grass of the school field, the four of us gazed at the cloud formations in the orange and purple sunset, panting. And with no real warning, Benjamin and I kissed.

It was a kiss on the lips, spontaneous but still quite unmistakably a kiss.

The jolt of unfamiliar intimacy was disorienting. We pulled away seconds later, but everything had already changed.

The two of us stared at our feet and blushed wildly, and if Ben and I were shell-shocked by this revelation, we weren't the only ones.

Dahlia and Theresa had seen what had happened. Not so long before, such an encounter would have evoked cries of "boy germs". But not now.

Without saying a word, we all decided to pretend that nothing had happened.

But that wasn't the end of it. The next afternoon the four of us lay on the soft green front lawn at Dahlia's parents' place after skateboarding up and down the street all day, and Ben and I found ourselves holding hands and grinning stupidly. A strange euphoria came over me. I no longer thought of him as Ben, the geeky friend of mine, but rather as BEN, in capital letters with hearts around hisname.

Before long he was making cassettes of Air Supply ballads, and I was drawing dragons for him with little love poems and slipping them into his parents' mailbox. We stopped staring at the moving clouds the way we always had and started staring into each other's eyes with lovesick intensity instead.

We were infatuated. Disaster could not be far behind.

One day Ben and I were holding hands, and most probably not paying nearly enough attention to our two other friends, when Theresa burst into tears and ran into her house. Dahlia had to explain that Theresa had a crush on Benjamin but had failed to mention said crush to me or to Ben.

In retrospect it seems inevitable. It was the first summer our hormones had started to get the better of us, and with Ben being one male among three female friends, someone was bound to harbour curious feelings. How could our little group survive our sexes now that we were on the cusp of becoming teenagers?

Sadly, we couldn't. Bryan Adams played Summer of Sixty-nine while our summer break of '86 came to an end, and the tensions in our young changing lives pulled us slowly apart. Dahlia soon dropped out of school, just as her brothers had, and we didn't see her much. Theresa's family moved, and only four years later young Theresa was a single mother living on what the Canadian government could provide. Two summers on I was already thrust into the adult world of work and responsibility as I negotiated an early modelling career in Milan.

And Ben, well, I don't know what happened to Ben. I never saw him again after that first, failed summer of love.

I knew nothing about love at the time but, then again, I was only 12. Twenty years later, I am not sure I have any excuses.

*

This first love confessional was first published in The Australian, (2006) and published in the anthology Some Girls Do - My Life As A Teenager (2007) edited by Jacinta Tynan and published by Allen & Unwin to raise funds for SISTER2Sister- a mentor program for disadvantaged teenage girls. Buy the book to read more stories of teenage angst and first love, by a total of 51 authors including Nikki Gemmel, Kathy Lette, Jessica Adams, Kate Morton, Jessica Rowe, Leigh Redhead, Melinda Hutchings and Sarah Wilson.

Happy reading,


PS. Check out today's Sunday Life magazine (Australia), for the story of how I finally grew up and found the real thing more than twenty years after that first summer of love. And no, there wasn't any skateboarding involved...