Tell us about your first kiss. Who was it with? How old were you?
His name was Fin Madden. I was sixteen years old. I was so relieved that I had finally gotten kissed.
We met during a high school band exchange (he played clarinet, and I played bells and percussion, otherwise known as “toys and whistles, without the whistles”). After the official trips to each other’s towns with our respective school band (we lived about 4 hours apart), we spent a summer writing letters to each other and racking up our parents’ phone bills. (I paid my mom back for every single one of the calls I made.) We visited each other once that summer – he came to my house once and I went to his house once.
After his trip to my house, and hanging out with my family and friends, things began to fizzle. He suddenly wasn’t able to talk on the phone as much or for as long, and the letters got shorter. The timing of this was not lost on me. Finally, after a couple weeks of this, I finally phoned him and said “So, are we done?” I don’t remember his exact answer, but we were definitely done.
I’ve never seen or heard from him since.
Two good things I got out of this relatonship. Travelling to see him marked another first in my life – my first train trip taken alone, something I enjoy to this day. That train trip was also when I read one of my favourite books for the first time “The Robber Bride”, by Margaret Atwood.
