rick

My first love.

We were very young, but I honestly though that I would marry this guy and spend the rest of my life with him.

I think I was fifteen and he was sixteen and he was my first really serious boyfriend. After school I would get the bus to his house and sit in the back room of his house, the tiled room, his family called it. We would cuddle on the couch watching afternoon TV shows (mostly cartoons) and eating amazing Portuguese food cooked by his stout adorable mother. Always clad in apron and messy hair in a bun. She was the sweetest lady on the planet.

She would pinch my arms and my ribs and say ‘you need more food! I cook for you? You want chicken? I make you chicken.” and without waiting for a reply I would suddenly have a steaming plate of Portuguese chicken and rice that would make Nandos jealous!

Also, huge ego boost for a teenager who hates her body (all teens girls have this affliction at some stage; it’s a little boost of hatred society gives you just for shits & gigs).  Rib pinching and force feeding?! Hells yeah. I was a rake, get me a cheeseburger! Fatten me up! This lady sure knew how to stroke an insecure girl’s ego!

Rick would send me love texts throughout the day. GOD! I wish that was still thing. Just a midday pick me up “I love you <3” or “you make me so happy”. Who wouldn’t love that, mid-morning coffee followed by a little validation of your adoration text? Sign me up.

We went to arcades together and he would use all his tickets to get me a ridiculous memento of the day like a mini pink slinky or a glittery bouncy ball. Yeah this was love, I was sure of it. He gave me his jumped when I was cold. He wore a shell necklace. He was just so beautiful. I remember sometimes just sneakily starring at his face out of the corner of my eyes & thinking “wow, you’re beautiful, I love you and I will love you forever”. Maybe in some weird way I still do.

I love that face I used to look at. The sweet memories of falling in love with 16 year old Rick.The joy I got with every kiss & every note & every text. The very real pain of my first heartbreak. It wasn’t the love of novels, but it was pretty epic in my world.

I gave him my first ever blow job.

I had no idea what I was doing. I had heard about it from other girls at my school and I was desperate to be able to do it, but I was really unsure of how to go about it. It seemed like the fucking weirdest and wrong thing in the world. In my mouth? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

Cosmopolitan magazine was for sure lying. Their page by page, step by step description had to be a hoax. This was some kind of universal joke, maybe it was an April fools kind of thing, like when the BBC convinced all of Britain that spaghetti trees were a thing. There were millions of women on their knees who would get a collective embarrassed giggle out of the fact that they listened to this lie & actually did it.

We were at the wave pool with a group of friends, making out in the water, jumping up in the ways, snuggling skin to skin. And I was like, yes, I’m going to do it. Go me for this confidence by the way! I walked the boy down the slippery hallways to the disabled bathroom (sorry) we needed more space. And he sat on the bench seat , while I got down on my knees on the wet tiles. It was so weird, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. For some fucked up reason, I really wanted to remember the taste so I could commit it to memory and talk with the ‘cool girls’ at school about what I thought my boyfriend tasted like. They all had a different opinion on taste and consistency. Really it was just an excuse for them to scream, I’m amazing and I’m sexually active! I’ve given head, bow down prudish bitches! And I wanted to join this weird fellatio club.

To this day the smell of chlorine still reminds me of blow jobs.

Rick and I ended up eventually breaking up over something really mundane like, we could be bothered getting the bus to each other’s houses anymore and we didn’t have a car. Really I think it was because we were babies in love and just wanted to explore other options.

But I missed his mum. Severing that tie was really hard.

I’m not actually kidding, when you date a European boy with a sweet mother, you have to break up with two people. And she is always the hardest.