30 days of night- part 2

[thejunipertree]

01 - Introduction


02 - Your first love
My first love was Mighty Mouse; I was four years old. I had a stuffed doll of him with a hard, plastic head and I would sit behind the couch in a cardboard box and pretend we were kissing. His ears looked a bit ragged because I chewed on them. I don't know what ever happened to him, as later that year I was given a stuffed Sylvester the cat by my father that, to this day, I can not sleep without. Bedraggled and threatening to come apart, his seams have gone velveteen real.

My first love was the ocean. It was a difficult courting and at first, I was very much afraid. One afternoon, at a friend's house, I read a book that had a center spread of the ocean, with a bunch of the sea's denizens inked into the scene in gorgeous colors. It wasn't drawn to scale, so fish which lived in the upper areas of the water were drawn amongst the devilish creatures living in the sub-regions, where light does not travel. One look at their needle teeth and dangly faux headlamps and I felt my brain shift sideways. The next day, my mother announced we were going to the beach for the day. How I screamed and cried, my mother was so angry with my hysterics that she canceled the day trip. Now, I dream of flashing teeth and rolled back black eyes, feeling the brine slide against my skin and the taste of panic almost rising in my throat.

My first love was a boy named David Bright Britton. We were in the same first grade class and I liked that he had the same shade blue eyes I did. He didn't make fun of my name and he let me have all the puzzle pieces. Once, he called me on the phone at night and we played Tom and Jerry.

My first love was Annie Lennox. I remember watching the video for Here Comes the Rain Again when I was in fifth grade and feeling something pulling and heated inside of me, the infant and fledgling stages of youth's desire, that I had previously only felt when I looked at the opposite sex. I laid in my bed that night, staring at the ceiling, and wondered what it would feel like to kiss her.

My first love was Primadonna cheese. The initial bite spread across my tongue in a flood of salty wealth, tiny crystals exploding against my teeth and a nutty richness leaving a soft warmth in its wake. I had always been a fan of cheese before, but this was the first time that I tasted something and immediately began choosing flavors to pair it with, complement and contrast. After that day, my cooking was never the same.

My first love was a hit of LSD, blurry print of a shamrock dissolving dry on my tongue. I danced through the night with my brain shooting sparks, my hands casting colored trails every time I gestured expansively. I felt alive and wrapped in the softest cotton wool. I was a dreamer of dreams. Doors opened in my head that I never knew existed. Nothing is true, everything is permissable. I stayed up until the sun rose, reading Naked Lunch and watching the words crawl feverishly across the page.

My first love didn't handle my heart with care and broke it when I gave it to him, but he also wasn't very good at being gentle with his own heart either. He had curly hair, played guitar, and had blue eyes. Blue-eyed boys always hurt the most, for some reason. All of the other girls had crushes on him, but he wanted me. Me? This is something I still can't comprehend to this day. I was fat and only passably not unattractive, he made me feel beautiful. I came from a painfully white trash household, he made me feel bohemian and full of life. We sat on a dune hill, wrapped in a stolen blanket and under the widest night sky I've seen, explaining that he had wanted to kiss me for quite some time. But, he also made me feel slow and stupid, unable to keep up with his wit and supposed vague worldliness, and later taught me that sometimes people lie to spare you more pain on top of pain. A little death to prevent further bloodshed, I reckon. I further learned that regardless of intent, finding out you've been lied to is even worse than being hurt in the first place. I'm not sure I can ever forgive him that, even though the last time I saw him, I touched his hand, cold and waxen and carefully arranged, and whispered my absolution. A small lie, another little death, but acceptable given the circumstances. The same lesson he taught me, I only realized much later.

My heart is comprised of nothing but my first love. It writhes in multitude between the walls of my heart, bursting forth when fruition is finally reached. I've always been the kind of person who falls in love over and over again. Every day is another chance to find new love and sometimes that is the only thought that keeps me going when I arrive home dead tired and utterly disgusted with the world. New experiences to keep and hoard, obsessions to furtively plot machinations about. Small joys. Some go after a span of time, a white hot flash gone as quickly as it arrived with nothing left in its wake to prove it ever existed. But others streak across, leaving behind a lasting impression against my retinas, like from staring at the sun too long. I love them all.

03 – Your parents
04 – What you ate today
05 – Your definition of love
06 – Your day
07 – Your best friend
08 – A moment
09 – Your beliefs
10 – What you wore today
11 – Your siblings
12 – What’s in your bag
13 – This week
14 – What you wore today
15 – Your dreams
16 – Your first kiss
17 – Your favorite memory
18 – Your favorite birthday
19 – Something you regret
20 – This month
21 – Another moment
22 – Something that upsets you
23 – Something that makes you feel better
24 – Something that makes you cry
25 – A first
26 – Your fears
27 – Your favorite place
28 – Something that you miss
29 – Your aspirations
30 – One last moment