All Loves Are First Loves

by Annabeth Leong

All loves are first loves. Each love is its own fresh thing.

I never know the rules when I start out. I am at first too high to care whether the parachute is in good working condition. This is the time for gestures. I’ll meet you at the airport on a layover so I can see you for half an hour over coffee when neither of us can keep our eyes open. My inner thighs will shiver when I think of you. It does not matter how many people there have been before, because none of them were you.

All loves are first loves. Each ends with the belly flop, the naive shock of pain and impermanence.

Bright green leaves turn to ashes in my palms. I made foolish promises, and now I am sorry for them. I apologize both to you and to myself. I should have known not to make those promises. When I am truly intoxicated, I can be touched, but now I don’t want to be. I will meet you for half an hour over coffee at a Burger King so you can awkwardly hand me gifts your parents brought to the last big family gathering, because they didn’t know yet that we have split up. I know I will survive this because I existed before you.

First love is idolized by so many for its tenderness, its believe in forever. When I think of it, though, I think of the manipulations it involved, its unreasonable expectations.

If you love me, you’ll let me touch you here. If you love me, you’ll forgive me for this. If you love me, you won’t run when you ought to run. If you love me, you’ll do it. If you love me, you’ll want what I want, always and forever. If you love me… If you love me…

I have been the receiver, and I have been the manipulator.

All loves are first loves. There is always a fine line between self-sacrifice and self-sabotage, between ardent request and manipulation, between the passion’s abandon and oblivion.

I want you to try fucking me in the ass/I will let you fuck me in the ass/I will not fight too hard when you insist on fucking me in the ass. I will confess my fantasies to you/I will make myself vulnerable with them/I will let you use them to tear me apart from inside out. I will touch myself for you/I will let you shame me for touching myself.

All loves are first loves, tender and naive, demanding and embarrassing, shocking and exhilarating. I don’t know the rules. Sometimes, they bloom to wise love; sometimes, they wither. Flowers fade. Seeds fall on fertile ground and grow again.

***

(I apologize for the late post, and also for not making my usual comments on the posts of others. I’m swamped at the moment, but I thought I could work something out. I will read and comment on your stuff soon!)

First Love: Do the Memories Linger On?

Write about first love? Sigh.

That would mean wallowing in memories, and I’ve been burned out lately on the memory front, spending so much time in the home where I grew up long ago and in doctors’ offices with my father—I should get the word on Tuesday or Wednesday whether lung cancer is the likely candidate to keep him from reaching 100, which he has no ambition to do—that I feel disoriented even when I manage to get to my own home for a while to tend to my garden, make jam from fruit that can’t wait, and edit erotica. You know, those kinds of things that root in you in who you are now.

Sooo, I’m going to punt this one, toss a question back at all of you, and then maybe post a brief fiction excerpt.

Do you ever have erotic dreams about your first love? Or at least a love from long ago? (“Long ago” being, of course, a very subjective concept, as, in fact, is “love.”) Let’s take that a step farther, and make it two questions. Do you ever think about past lovers during present sex? Envision them, see them as you imagined them to be, as you wanted them to be, even though you know now and maybe knew then that neither they nor you were exactly the way you imagined each other? In short, fantasize during sex about someone from long ago? It could be just for a few vital seconds for that last push over the edge, a vision flashing though your mind of something you did with them, or, even more powerful, something you wish you’d done with them but never dared to. It could be a total fantasy, just using a remembered figure as a silhouette to be fleshed out by your own creative muse. Just like writing erotica.

And now for a story excerpt. Apologies for the repetition; I posted some of this just a month or so ago, but this time I’ve left a bit out and included some passages more to the point.
__________

Alternate Lives
Sacchi Green
                                                       
In that wartime English summer Cleo had made me soar, even though I never left the ground.
Thirty-five years later, in 1978, her plane rose, and banked, leaving Anchorage dwindling in the distance. As the clouds lifted in the east, the towering glory of Denali blazed suddenly white in the sun.
"The mountain's out!" someone shouted behind me.
"Sure is," Cleo said, above the hum of the engine. "Takes your breath away, doesn't it?"
But it was Cleo Remington herself who took my breath away.
I watched her strong hands on the controls, remembering the way she had touched the Spitfire fighter plane that last night in England. Remembering, across the years, the way she had touched me.

(irrelevant snipped part)

My body was alert to Cleo's least movement. I wanted so intensely to lay my hand where a band of sunlight curving across her thigh that my own thighs quivered.
How had I thought I could carry this off? But I savored the anguish, every searing drop. In two weeks I would return to Jack, who truly loved and needed me, who had built a life with me. My love for him had never been diminished by the memories of Cleo kept tucked away like rare, glowing jewels I could never wear again.
     “Never," though, has a different ring to it when you're nearing sixty, and you know damned well that life is too short to waste on guilt. What you want is what you want, whether you can have it or not. I can't be the only woman to find that as the biological imperative wanes, other passions intensify. That hidden glow can flare into a heat too intense to deny.
Not that I would ever hurt Jack. He didn't know what aching dreams impelled me sometimes to rouse him early and urge him into my already-slippery cunt. He didn't need to know how I had discovered, late in life, the fine art of masturbation, or whose hands and body I felt when I touched myself, whose name I cried out. He only needed to know that I would always be with him.
When I told him I wanted to take this trip he understood, or thought he did. He'd heard all about how women these days need to "find themselves." Long ago I'd had to tell him just a little about Cleo, anyway; I couldn't very well hide the tiny wings tattooed above my left breast.
"I had a friend who was a pilot, ferrying fighter planes for the RAF," I'd said. "I was jealous of her silver wings, so we went to a tattoo parlor down by the docks in London and both got tattooed." He'd laughed, and teased me about my drunken debauchery days, and was relieved, I think, that no man was involved. But when we'd parted, Jack had held me close and murmured, "Wherever you go, please don't get lost." How much, after all, had he guessed?
__________

Getting back to my questions, above: You tell me yours, and I might tell you one or two of mine. Blurred to protect the obliviously innocent. This is all just between us, right? (Fortunately I never call out names during sex, having quite enough to do with my voice without resorting to words.)

Flash Fiction - Lightning

From my brief time writing flash fiction, comes this story. It doubles as a slightly fictionalised version of when I left home, and rolls on to the moment I met my first true love. 27 years later, and she's still with me.

LIGHTNING

Long blades of fire tore down from the sky. They hacked into the ersatz bubble we’d put our home in. Rude fingers of electricity curled around the house, searching for any available space to thrust into. Like smack-addled burglars they invaded with fixated efficiency. They cut into our bodies and left us tingling, filled our nostrils with the sharp scent of life, wiped our minds of all thoughts except one: I am still alive.

A slivered second later, furious fists of noise pounded the roof like debt collectors. My mother squealed, my brother jumped, my father froze. I simply waited, wondering what might be next.

In any home invasion, material losses are inconsequential. What hurts is the slow burn, the virus of vulnerability that an act of assault awakens. The house had been built from the earth it sat on. Strong and stout, it showed no ill effects from the storm.

But that home had been our asylum. It was what separated us from the bewildering world. We were a force, an army united against whatever was thrown at us. In a single flash we were cauterized, and the truth became clear: that we were four spent rifles, stacked against each other. The friction of our co-existence was all there was to stop us falling.

The effect was different on each of us. As the youngest, when those charged tentacles whipped through our house, all I felt was alive. For the first time. As if the lightning had jolted me from the coma I’d lived in for 18 years.

I felt the swelling of energy inside me and knew it had to come out. I was pulled away without knowing where I was headed.

I found study in a distant town. I made a place to stay and I was flushed with the potency of sudden adulthood. My knowledge was topsoil, rich and shallow, too focused to admit doubts.

Any hesitance I had was burned away in the slivered second between when she first appeared and when I first truly saw her.

It was lightning.

We circled each other for weeks, the air around us becoming charged whenever we made contact. She made me ache, first in the guts, then in the balls, then back up in the guts again. She jabbed at the energy inside me and made me stand up all over. 

My body, my hair...my cock.

It was inevitable that we would become fused. The attraction was almost polar. As if every bump of mine was designed to fill a curve of hers. When she stood before me, naked for the first time, my heart held still. The touch of her breasts against my lips thudded through to my heels in a sensation that seemed familiar.

It was lightning.

We sought out all the different ways each other’s body could taste until we blended like clouds. She filled my nostrils with the sharp scent of life as the curious softness of her slit washed against my tongue.

The inexorable pull of nature called me higher until I was hovering over her. Our mouths were drawn together as my heat drove into her. In that slivered second, our bodies arced together. 

It was lightning.

Our hips jolted outside of our control. Every place we touched burned with need. She squealed. I jumped. We froze. We waited, wondering what might be next.

It was lightning.

It began in my guts, where she’d first made me ache. It pooled, it drove and finally a bolt of pure white heat shot out from me and into her.

She left me tingling, wiped my mind of all thoughts except one: I am now alive. I knew her, before we’d even met. She was elemental, and truly it was she who pulled me from that fetid coma.

She is lightning.

When We Were Jung

by Giselle Renarde

I'm not sure why I have this book.

I found it at the back of my bookshelf last week. It's some kind of journal, I guess, published by the University of Toronto's Undergraduate English Student's Union. I was a student at U of T, but not an English student. Nothing I wrote back then was ever published.

I was about to get rid of it when I had two thoughts: 1) I wonder if that's a painting of Lisa Kudrow; and 2) Hey, I don't think I ever even opened this thing.

So I opened it. I flipped through it. And one paper caught my eye:

Oh my god, Fifth Business! OH MY GOD, JUNG!!!

Let me take you back in time. Back to high school. Back to Grade 12 English class and Fifth Business.



In case you haven't heard of it, Fifth Business is a novel by Robertson Davies. For a book that had me awestruck at seventeen, I actually don't remember much about it. Mind you, flipping through the Jungian interpretation in this student journal, I do remember how I felt the first time I read it--not just read it, but analyzed it. From a Jungian perspective, of course.

I was in Grade Seven the first time I read Jung. At the time, I was interested in parapsychology. I knew Jung was a respected psychologist, so I thought he might have something to say on the matter of psychics and ghosts and all that. He didn't, not really, but I didn't find that out until I'd walked to the public library and checked out the biggest book of Jung they had.



What I got from Jung was a kind of spiritual fulfillment I never found with religion. At thirteen, my parents allowed me to choose whether I wanted to continue (casually) attending church services or not. My mom and dad weren't religious, and my grandparents were atheists and agnostics, so they didn't really care, but I wanted to make the right choice.

When I was twelve, I researched world religions--in preparation. Thirteen would be a big year for my soul. Lots of responsibility. Better get this right.

Eastern religions appealed to me, but I ultimately decided that organized religion wasn't my bag. I think it was those eastern influences that drew me to Jung's writings. I would give you specifics if I could remember any, but my academic years are a haze now. Sometimes I think I've forgotten 90% of everything I've ever learned.

Anyway, by the time we studied Fifth Business in Grade Twelve, I'd read a lot of Jung. It isn't by chance that the book opens itself so neatly to Jungian interpretation. Jung is built right into to text.

Still, I was entranced by my teacher's lessons. He'd written his Masters thesis on Jungian influences in Fifth Business, so it was close to his academic heart.

Maybe that's how my teacher worked his way so close to my heart--both academically and romantically. I loved Jung. He loved Jung. We talked Jung. We talked and talked and talked. He seemed so impressed by my knowledge, and even now I don't think that was put on. I'd read a lot, for a seventeen-year-old.

In fact, I read the whole Deptford Trilogy, in part to impress him, and in part because Robertson Davies had a piece of my heart, too. I read the Deptford Trilogy, and we talked about it. Talked about it, talked about Jung. He bought me The Cornish Trilogy and I devoured that as well.

I felt proud that someone so intelligent could be infinitely interested in what I had to say. I had a hungry, hungry ego, and he fed it with attention.

When I wrote Audrey and Lawrence (a collection of short stories about a married man and his much younger mistress) I called his character Lawrence Galloway. For consistency's sake, I reused that name when I published Like It's 1999: Diary of a Teenager in Love with a Teacher (which, as you know, is my actual real life journal from my last year of high school).

Funny that it's taken me this many years to piece together the Jung connection. I really didn't see it before now, but we had a bit of a menage situation, Lawrence, Jung, Robertson Davies and 17-year-old me.

Jung brought us together, but if we'd been interested in analyzing ourselves as much as we were interested in analyzing Canadian literary fiction, we wouldn't have stayed together long. Our complexes were invisible to our eyes, and they kept us going for a good ten years after Jung had jumped ship.

Love of My Life

By Lisabet Sarai

I figure my parents must have started teaching me to read when I was four. Certainly I remember my pride when at the age of five, I could make it all the way through Dick, Jane and Sally on my own. Even before then, my dad and mom read aloud to my brother and me, not just stories but poetry, too. Words—beautiful, lively, evocative words—were a part of my earliest experience.

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea

In a beautiful pea green boat.

They took some money and plenty of honey

Wrapped up in a five pound note.

The Owl looked up at the stars above

And sang to a small guitar.

“Oh beautiful Pussy, oh Pussy my love,

What a beautiful Pussy you are, you are,

What a beautiful pussy you are.

That’s from memory, laid down close to sixty years ago.

By the time I was six, I had a library card. I read whatever I could get my hands on, diving into alternative literary worlds that seemed at least as real as the one in which I lived. I remember the Mushroom Planet books by Eleanor Cameron haunted me. Then there was book entitled The City Under the Back Steps (now out of print, apparently), a cautionary tale about girl who’s shrunk and imprisoned in an ant colony as punishment for her deliberate squashing of the ants on her back walk. That (obviously) made a huge impression on me—and I learned a lot about ants. A few years on, I was devouring Nancy Drew mysteries, practicing to improve my powers of observation and imagining myself as a clever detective, and a series called Childhood of Famous Americans, bios of people like Sacajawea, Betsy Ross, Helen Keller and Juliet Lowe. (According to Amazon, this series is still alive and well. It now includes the likes of Neil Armstrong and, heaven help us, Ronald Reagan!)

Science fiction—Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov—came a bit later. I read the Foundation Trilogy in junior high school and was sufficiently influenced by those books that I actually called a local talk show to ask Isaac Asimov a question. Before you shrug and say “so what?”, you should know that I was pathologically shy at that point and would do anything to avoid using the telephone. (Remind me to tell you the lost library book story some time.) My passion for his story overcame my terror. (As it turned out, he was rude and dismissive. I was crushed.)

Another milestone I recall was The Count of Monte Cristo, at 1100+ pages the longest book I’d ever read. That was in 8^th grade. And Gone with the Wind—when would that have been? Probably around the same time. All I know is that I cried at the end, devastated that Scarlet’s blindness and pride had robbed her of Rhett’s love. Meanwhile, Stranger in a Strange Land, also consumed during my mid-teens, had a huge impact on my imagination and my developing sexuality. I’m certain my tendencies toward polyamory can be traced to the Valentine Michael Smith’s “sharing water”.

For years, I spent my afternoons sprawled on my bed with nose in a book, as my mother would say. She would prod me to get up, go outside, get some fresh air, play with friends. I far preferred the company of the characters in my most recent read to the kids in my suburban neighborhood. Sherlock Holmes—Catherine and Heathcliff—Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester—Frodo and Gandalf—Captain Nemo—the eponymous Rebecca in Daphne Du Maurier’s tale and “She” who must be obeyed, in H. Rider Haggard’s classic—there weren’t enough hours in the day to spend with them, as far as I was concerned. Reading let me explore ancient Egypt, classical Greece, medieval France and Celtic Britain, wandering in both space and time. How could the backyard or the local mall compete?

I have vivid recollections of many wonderful books, up until my late teens. Anorexia really messed up my memory, perhaps due to a lack of nutrients. Or maybe my mental abilities were impaired by the anti-depressants I took regularly for several years. Certainly I read voraciously while I was bouncing around from one hospital or temporary home to another. What else was I going to do? Dropped out of college, estranged from my family, suspicious of all the people who wanted me to eat, torn by anxiety and self-disgust, I took refuge in books. I hardly recall anything I read, however, though for some reason I know The Brothers Karamazov was on the list. Or maybe Crime and Punishment? It’s all a blur.

I hadn’t really read much erotica until I got involved with the man I call my master, while I was in grad school. He assigned me various texts: The Story of O, of course, and Anne Rice’s Beauty Trilogy, for a start. I discovered Victorian porn, The Pearl, My Secret Life and Laura, a book I’ve discussed here in the past which might not be Victorian at all, but which had a profound emotional and erotic effect on me.

Then in 1998, I happened on a used copy of Portia da Costa’s debut Black Lace book, Gemini Heat, which inspired me to pen my own first novel, and changed my life.

Since then I’ve consumed enormous quantities of erotica, as a reviewer, an editor, and just for fun. My reading tastes remain catholic, however. Usually I’ll have several books in process, at least one of which will not be erotic. Currently I’m reading The Echo Maker by Richard Powers, a literary novel about family and neurophysiology; Carousel by Aurelia T. Evans, which I guess would be categorized as kinky erotic horror; Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics and Lipstick Lesbians, by Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons (though I’ve gotten bogged down in this and haven’t opened it for months); and Sexual Outsiders: Understanding BDSM Sexualities and Communities, by David A. Ortmann and Richard A. Sprott. I still adore a solid science fiction tale; The Wind-Up Girl by Paolo Baccigalupi and Anathem by Neal Stephenson are highlights from recent years, enthusiastically recommended. Well-written historical fiction can still sweep me away, too, though I was a bit disappointed by my recent read of Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies.

In short, reading is my first and perhaps my most enduring love. The pleasure I’ve experienced writing this post, remembering my favorite books and reliving my first encounters with them, recalls the secret glow I feel after a night of erotic pleasure. Lovers come and go—sexual need fades with age—but books will always be there, or so I pray.

When I imagine my future, I see myself, perhaps infirm, perhaps indigent, even alone, but still reading. Without books, I wonder if life would be worth living.

Rex Smith, Pirates and Unrequited Love

I was fifteen, I think. Maybe sixteen, but probably fifteen since I can't remember having my driver's license and that's the kind of life-changing event that one remembers, right? Anyway, it was the early 80's and my life was high school, planning for college, writing dark and depressing fiction and poetry, hanging out with friends and nursing a boy crush that lasted seven years.

The details are fuzzy after all these years but it was a warm afternoon, that much I know for certain. Of course, I grew up in South Florida, so a warm afternoon is pretty much expected nine out of twelve months. If I had to guess, I was probably wearing a blouse in neon pink or orange and my tightest Jordache jeans that I would have had to lay down to zip with the help of the hook end of metal coat hanger pushed through the hole on the metal zipper. (I'm currently wearing maternity jeans with no zipper, so I can't check to see if this feature still exists on jean zippers.) It is with all certainty that I can say my hair was big and poofy (and frizzy from the Florida humidity) and I was wearing blue eye shadow and dangly earrings.

Shall we pause to let that mental image sink in?

I don't remember who picked the movie, but it certainly wasn't my crush. There were four of us at the movie theater, two other girls to join my crush and me. It wasn't a date, but I wanted it to be. We sat next to each other and when the lights went down I didn't much care about my other two friends or the theater full of people or even the movie. I just wanted to enjoy that two hours or whatever it was, sitting next to the boy of my dreams.

The movie we saw that day was the film version of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance. It starred Kevin Kline, whom I'm pretty sure I didn't know, and Linda Ronstandt, whom I did know because of her album Living in the USA. (I even had a satin baseball jacket like the one she wore on the album cover.) The film version of Pirates also starred Rex Smith, a sort of second tier teen heartthrob (at least to my mind). I knew him because he had starred in a TV film called Sooner or Later a few years earlier, which was either based on a book or had a book made out of the film. In any case, I may still have that book in my collection, with Rex in all his hunky heartthrobby shaggy blond haired sexiness.

I seriously doubt I picked that movie. Other than Grease, I don't know that I'd ever seen another musical and even though everyone I knew loved Grease I thought it was kind of silly that they sang throughout the film. (I'm a little more forgiving of musicals now.) But you could have sat me in a dark movie theater watching a two-hourloop of Ginsu knife informericasl and I would have been in heaven as long as my crush was sitting next to me.

As it turned out, I liked the movie. It was swashbuckling pirate fun and Rex looked hot and even the music didn't annoy me. For a few minutes here and there, I forgot that I was sitting next to my crush and just lost myself in the film. But at one point, I remember this clearly, Rex was on screen and my little teenaged heart was swooning for yet another unattainable male and I felt something brush my hand. I looked down and in the flickering light from the screen, I saw that my crush was touching me. His fingers brushing mine on the armrest, not in that accidental way that makes people quickly withdraw, but in that deliberate, secretive way of saying, "Hey, I'm here with you." And then, somehow, with no real effort on my part, our fingers were entwined. It was... if not orgasmic, certainly enough to distract me from Rex Smith and The Pirates of Penzance.

It never went any farther than hand holding for 30 minutes or so in a darkened movie theater. At a time when some of my friends were already having sex or doing "everything but," I was a romantic who read a lot of Harlequin romance novels and fell in love with the wrong boy. The boy who would always be just my good friend, maybe even my best friend, but never my boyfriend or my lover. And so my virginity was preserved. (Though a year or so later he did try to sleep with me and I had the fortitude to say no. To this day I don't know how or why I resisted.)

Over twenty-five years later, I honestly don't remember much about the film version of The Pirates of Penzance. The only other Gilbert and Sullivan opera I've seen is a community theater production of The Mikado, which I enjoyed but didn't have quite the same impact on me. But that memory of holding my crush's hand as Gilbert and Sullivan's pirate operetta played on the screen is special. It's one of those sweet, innocent recollections of youth that stays with me and pops up at unexpected moments-- like while watching the trailer for the newest Pirates of the Caribbean film. It's a memory with a catchy soundtrack that always makes me smile.

In Love with the Lens

By Lisabet Sarai

My first lover P. was a photographer. He carried his camera everywhere and took pictures of pretty much everything, though he was particularly talented when it came to portraits. He took some of the best photos of me that anyone ever has - normally I'm the least photogenic person in the universe! But I can't post them here, because someone from my distant past might recognize me.

Our relationship inspired me to get involved with photography. I was fourteen or fifteen at the time. I bought a used Kodak Signet 35 camera, something of a collector's item even back then. It offered completely manual settings for film speed, aperture and shutter speed - requiring a bit of work but on the other hand, providing total control. I also bought a light meter. (Remember those? Many of you probably don't!)

Under P.'s tutelage - well, actually, I learned most of the basics on my own - I started capturing the world around me. I even taught myself how to develop black and white film, although I have to admit that I only did so once or twice. (It was the same when I got my first car, about a decade later. I insisted on knowing how to change the oil myself, even though most of the time I didn't.)

Unlike P., I seemed to gravitate to images that didn't necessarily contain humans. The photo above was one of my early efforts. It's a photo of my younger brother's bedroom during exam period. He must have been a freshman in high school; I was a junior. The picture captures a sense of chaos and yet at the same time, it's a still life. The frenzied studying is over, or at least has been interrupted. Without checking, one suspects that the box of pretzels is empty. A shaft of sun illuminates the tousled bed clothes, gilding the abandoned books and notes.

It's in some ways typical of the photos I took. I liked patterns, tricks of the light, reflections, details that spoke volumes. When I was reviewing pictures for this blog, I found a couple of others from the same period, which illustrate my tastes.

The interesting thing is that I'm still drawn to the same sorts of images in the photos I take now. Here's a photo (not black and white) I took while I was in Japan last November.

I don't really consider myself a photographer. A true photo-phile never goes anywhere without a camera (and yes, my cell phone has one, but it's so pathetic it's not worth mentioning). But when I fell in love with P., it seems that I fell in love with the lens, too.