Wow, it's really crazy to think that my Mark and I had our very
first kiss 25 years ago today!!! And if someone had told us that night that we'd
be married 25 years later, we'd have laughed ourselves silly. Sure, we laugh
about it now, how we were two crazy 18~year~old kids, just out of high school,
and preparing to start college in a couple days. Crazy indeed.
Back then, I kept a journal and wrote pretty much everything that
happened to me...including what happened the night of our first kiss. I didn't
go into any sort of gory detail, but it was just enough for me to relive it
every time I read it henceforth. And when Mark got married in 1999, I read it
every single day for weeks, crying about how he was the one that got away. To
this day, I have no idea how I hid my depression from the jerk I was living
with at the time.
Being a recovered love addict, I cringe when I read in my old
journals how I was "in love" with any given dude at any particular
point in time. In recent years I've learned that (before Mark and I reconnected
last year), I was never truly in love with anyone I ever said I was in love
with: it was always infatuation and/or obsession, even with Mark 25 years ago.
I mean, how could it have truly been love if most of my journal entries began
with, "I'm so depressed" over the boy du jour? Yeah, I know. At least
Mark was "real," as my mom would put it, and we were friends. That
being said, let me take you back to September of 1987...
I was trying to get over my most recent boyfriend, and it got to
the point where I had to simply avoid him altogether (hmmm, now that sounds
familiar! *lol*). In the midst of that, I suddenly found myself wrestling with
"strong feelings" for Mark, which were unexpectedly reciprocated. I
say unexpected because he had a girlfriend at the time…and she was one of my
friends. (As an aside, because we’re still acquainted, please allow me to
formally apologize and ask forgiveness for all the times Mark and I hung out
behind your back…kids are impulsive and do stupid things.) Still, I shouldn't
have been so surprised by his feelings toward me, as just a year earlier Mark
had mentioned to a mutual friend, "She's pretty. I wouldn't mind having
her as a girlfriend." Ahhh, the irony. So a bunch of my friends had
planned the last party of the Summer, at Serrania Park. This same group of
friends had spent many nights over the previous few months hanging out,
drinking ill~gotten alcohol in places we ought not have been...and Mark was
part of that group. He and I remember one night at the top of DeSoto where I
ran to jump on his back, but he wasn't ready...and he dropped me on my
tailbone! We laugh about it now, but it was painful at the time. The party in
question was the night of September 12th, and started off great. Here’s an excerpt
from the journal entry that described what happened that night:
“Mark was a bit buzzed, so he started tickling me. That turned
into 2 hours of wrestling on the grass with him! I’m sore from that.”
After that, I was talking with another friend about Mark and me,
and how I was depressed over the fact that I couldn’t be with the boy I
had such deep feelings for…and I started crying. Mark eventually came over and
asked what was up. When we told him, he sat down and our friend left. The
pertinent journal excerpt:
“…I cried into Mark’s shoulder for a while. I sat up, & he
motioned for me to take his hand, so I did, & we sat there for a while. I
started crying again & he’s all, “Come on, Sweetheart, stop crying.” I
died! Then we had our foreheads touching, & he was stroking my cheek. Then
it happened: we kissed. It was so incredible. A couple minutes later it
happened again, only this time more intense. God, it was so rad.”
When Mark and I talked the next day, his conscience got the best
of him and he told me that it couldn’t happen again, even though it was
something we both wanted.
It wouldn’t be our last kiss before he got married in 1999, but it
was the one that meant the most…until our second “first kiss” on September 18th,
2011, after a 12~year~long separation. And 6 months later, we had our third
“first kiss,” this time as husband and wife. Crazy indeed!!
