Rebuilding Rob

God bless WordPress for coming up with 365 different “daily prompts“. While reading that many prompts and impressive feet in and of itself, it becomes an issue when a blogger posts consistently every day for well over a year. Inevitably, the same old prompts come back up again. Sometimes I can come up with something new to say about them. Sometimes I end up just reposting my old response.

But today, I decided to do something different. At the suggestion of one of our fellow WordPress bloggers, I decided to pull a prompt from this website.

How was your first kiss?

They say the first time ain’t the greatest
But I tell ya
If I had the chance to do it all again
I wouldn’t change a stroke

Prince, “Raspberry Beret”

With all due respect to Prince…

I want to say that I remember getting kissed by girls back in second or even first grade when we were playing “boys chasing girls“ and “girls chasing boys“ on the playground at recess.

By the way, we never really give up that game from then in, did we? It just kept mutated into a different form over the years, and decades.

I was a real late bloomer, socially speaking. I didn’t really start going on real dates until just after I graduated from high school. So my first real girlfriend was when I was 18. She was a year younger than me, and went to a different high school than the one from which I had just graduated. I will call her The Fraülein. Through her, I ended up meeting a couple of new friends who I still talk to, to this very day.

The Fraülein may very well have been even more socially inept than I was. She was honest, to a fault. Sometimes, brutally so. In fact, most people would probably say that she had no tact. The Fraülein was the first person that I had kissed. And she was the first person who had ever told me that I smelled like cigarettes.

To be clear, I’ve never smoked. I’ve only tried smoking a couple times in my life; that’s to say that it took literally a drag or two off of a cigarette. But growing up, The Old Man smoked in our house, probably all the way until I got into college. I specifically remember one time where Mother had got pneumonia. when that happened, she told the old man that she did not want him smoking in the house anymore. From then on, he would stand at the back door with a cigarette outside the door, or just smoke out on the patio or in the garage.

It’s ironic now that even though The Old Man passed 10 years, and didn’t smoke in the house for at least 10 years before that, Mother is suffering from COPD as I wrote this.

Growing up, I literally had no idea that cigarettes even had a distinctive odor to them. I would see the yellow stains on our ceilings in the house, knowing that they were from cigarettes. But never really putting on one and one together.

Back to my first kiss: it was awkward. It was sloppy. I tried to open my mouth. She didn’t. So we ended up just literally pressing lips together a few times. But I also remember The Fraülein telling me that I smelled like cigarettes. I was so embarrassed. In that moment, I could understand when it must’ve been like to be “the smelly kid in class“ and being told by other students that you stunk. There was nothing I could do about it. 

I got older, I realized. that your first kiss is just like the first time you have sex. It’s awkward. It’s uncomfortable, because you’re trying real hard to do it right and neither one of you really knows what the hell you’re supposed to be doing. But at the same time, you’re just glad to get it out of the way. 

The Fraülein and I didn’t date very long – three months at most. I think we both saw the writing on the wall she was the one who initially said to me “I want to break up with you” because even when I was avoidant, and she still had no tact.

I remember being upset that The Fraülein “beat me to the punch“ with the break up. I was thinking of the same thing that she was. It happened over the phone, and I remember getting on the phone earlier that they thinking that I wanted to break up with her by the end of that phone call. It was amicable. We had agreed to be friends. Granted, we weren’t “friendly”, but there was no animosity between either of us going forward.

I would still see The Fraülein from time to time; since I have befriended two of the guys that were in her circle of friends, and all three of them ended up going to the same college the following fall. We’re still friends on Facebook, but I don’t see her post very much. I’m not even sure that I still “follow” for her to be honest. We never talk. We certainly never talk about the past. The Fraülein has definitely become one of those people who you hang onto as a Facebook friend because you somehow think that defending them means that you’ll never speak to them again.

That first kiss was awkward and embarrassing. I usually tend to repress those kinds of memories. To be honest I’m amazed that I remember even as much about it as I do. But isn’t that what these “firsts” are supposed to be?

I am quickly approaching a special milestone for this blog: I will soon reach 500 consecutive days of blogging! Stay tuned…

Thanks for stopping by Rebuilding Rob. Be sure to like, 👍 comment and subscribe to my blog below. It’s greatly appreciated! Also, feel free to follow me on social media as well! Check out my most recent posts as well as some earlier, related posts:

• Of Training Wheels and Christmas Lights
• Charity Starts at Home (And I’m Back in My Childhood One)
• The Muscle of Empathy
• Where Do We Go From Here? Five Years Since January 6.
• Bugs, Boundaries, and the Art of Not Being Invisible

The article “The First Time” first appeared on Rebuilding Rob.