Flashback

He was my first real boyfriend, my first love, my first somebody who stood by me and was there for me. He was tall, blond, tan, strong and had blue eyes that looked through you, instead of at you. He was my first, “real”. We played in the California sun, swinging at the park, watching stars late into the night, saying nothing, but still so much. Running around Studio City, eating Jerry’s Deli and seeing Sarah Jessica Parker & Robert Downey Jr. when they were on a date, while we were on a date. Summer daze on summer days.

About a year after we got together, we decided since we were all grown up at 18 years of age, it was time to move in together. Our first apartment was a one bedroom dump in the San Fernando Valley, but it was all ours and to us, it was beautiful. The 1970’s shag carpet, avocado green fridge, was beautifully detailed by our view of the kidney shaped pool.

One night, my first love begin to show his love as he wiped my long blond hair away from my sun kissed skin. We kissed, we played and we shared ourselves in the most pleasant of ways, until he thought it would be fun to show me a new world of something a little rougher. Though he was playing, something snapped and my body screamed, my mind raced, and everything felt cold, yet the cold burned me. I had to get away from him, but I couldn’t. There was no escaping, because it wasn’t him that I feared, but it was HIM.

With all the might I could muster in my small 5′1 frame, he was kicked back from me, like he was a leaf in a santa anna wind. I cowered on the floor and scurried away from him like a demon crouching low to hide from the light. I ducked and hid in the corner, but I couldn’t escape, I couldn’t run, I couldn’t hide. It all came flooding back, my mind was open with a downpour of un-escapable memories.

I was 14 years old, with a crush on a college boy that hung out at my friends house because her mother was never home and the parties went on for days. He was everything I was not and all I wanted to be and I was fascinated and intrigued by his olive skin, dark hair, and fast car. I had a crush and then, I was crushed. I didn’t drink, but I did that night and it made me queasy, so I went to an upstairs bedroom to cower under covers until the liqued stoped melting my mind.

I was alone, and then I wasn’t. I was pinned on my back in the dark, on the mattress on the floor, on New Year’s Eve. I cried, as he layed on top of me. pressing into me with his large hand over my face as tears silently and softly fell from my eyes, and sat on my cheeks. I was dirty and nobody could know. I heard everyone scream “happy new years” and moments later he was gone, and so was I.

Nobody could know, not then or ever and I buried that secret in my soul, until my love dug it up. He meant to sprinkle me with petals of love and instead scarred me, with razor sharp thorns. My past, wasn’t history, just part of herstory.