Double Negative

The first person I ever loved was Nika.

I can still remember everything about her, after all these years. She was a new foreign exchange student in my junior year of high school, and I was immediately drawn to her. The first thing I noticed was her long brown hair dyed green at the ends, and that she dressed like a punk rockstar. The second thing I noticed was her smile when we made eye contact. I had never known that another girl could bring such an intense blush to my cheeks, but the way her lips turned up slightly in the corners undeniably ensnared me, and we soon became friends.

She would come over to my house quite often, and we would dye our hair crazy colors and go on long walks around the neighborhood. We'd inevitably end up at an empty plot of land where she would slip a cigarette in her mouth at the earliest convenience, but that was okay because it was legal where she came from. We talked about our difficult lives at home, our hopes for the future, and other intimate things. One day I let slip that I had taken to cutting the back of my thumb, and she held the hand that I marred with such love that I could have died happy that very second. She always treated me tenderly like that, despite the fact that we were only friends. It only made me fall harder for her.

We ended up taking a surprise trip to New Orleans around Mardi Gras, as it was nearing the end of her time at my school and we wanted to celebrate. We traveled there on a charter bus, giggling at how adult we felt despite the fact that her host mother was chaperoning the trip. The day we spent there was absolutely unforgettable. Strangers bought us alcoholic drinks, we went inside every voodoo shop we came across, and we even ended up falling asleep near a fountain just to wake up in the middle of a wedding. Eventually her host mother got hungry, and she stopped off at a Hard Rock Cafe while Nika and I continued to peruse the French Quarter. We had a few more drinks and ended up on the grimy front stoop of a strangers home right outside of Bourbon street, drunkenly laughing and holding hands, which we did often by this point but I always figured was just a friendly gesture.

After falling victim to another fit of laughter, while I was catching my breath and staring into her eyes, she leaned forward suddenly and kissed me. It was a simple kiss with no urgent passion behind it, but I savored the brief taste of cigarettes and fruity cocktails nonetheless. I wasn't allowed to love women, I wasn't even allowed to like them, but right then and there I knew without a doubt that I loved Nika. She pulled back and looked at me with shock, then smiled when she caught sight of my own gleeful grin. A few weeks later she traveled back across the world to Russia, and I stayed here with the sweetest of memories.

And so I learned that I could love a woman.

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The person I lost my virginity to was Bob.

I don't remember much of him other than the fact that he was a cowboy and had made my life a living hell for eight months. I'm not exactly sure why he dated me, but I knew why I wanted to date him. It was my senior year of high school and I had taken a different boy to homecoming, where he then shunned my every advance for hours on end. Later that night we attended a lock-in at a rock climbing gym, and I ended up meeting Bob. He doted on me all night, giving me every last shred of his attention—and I was in no position to ignore attention, whether it came from a man or a woman.

He ended up asking me out, and I accepted because I was under an odd kind of pressure. A pressure to figure out my sexuality, partly, but mostly a pressure that I'm sure we can all relate to. Peer pressure. See, all of my girl friends were at that age where they were starting to experience certain desires. They were experimenting with their bodies, with other people's bodies, trying to find all the ways they could satiate these desires...and I just never got it. I had never felt the urge to touch myself, to explore my body in ways that everybody else was, and I certainly had never felt the urge to have sex. But these things had to happen eventually, right?