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My First
A Confession by Anon
It’s hard to explain the night you lost your virginity to your first love and you think you were
raped but you’re not entirely sure. I was 15, depressed, and wasted. He was 18, in a band, with
breath that always smelled of booze and garlic. I was in love.
So cliché, but I just wanted him to like me. Embarrassing.
I can’t remember if it was his first time too. We were at some guy’s apartment (who wasn’t there)
with my friends and his friends. Minors alone with empty bedrooms, booze and condoms.
Dangerous. But at least we practiced safe sex.
The only thing I remember leading up to us laying in a stranger’s bed is stumbling upstairs from
the living room where everyone else was hanging out. And that my best friend was in the
bathroom off of the bedroom I was in, making out with her quasi-boyfriend. When it all started I
tried to focus on my friend giggling in the bathroom, tried to pretend like I was happy, too. I
wasn’t me, I was her—sitting on the bathroom counter, legs dangling down, playfully straddling a
boy.
Before we had sex, we pulled back the covers on the bed, revealing white sheets. I was
mortified… don’t you bleed when you lose your virginity? I’m going to bleed on some random
guy’s sheets. Apparently that didn’t worry me enough to put a stop to anything. I felt
disconnected from everything—from him, from myself, from the stranger’s bed I laid in. I was in
a space just south of reality, a place where life seems dangerously unreal. Maybe that is love.
Maybe that is drunk. I didn’t know. What I did know: it was Friday night, and fate was on our
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side. We were provided with an empty apartment to party in, which was as good a sign as any
that this should happen.
We fumbled each other’s clothes off, stripping down to our cotton underwear. I was wearing blue
panties. He took them off, spread my legs, and put a Trojan on. I was falling-down drunk and
could still feel pain so intense it made me cry. One of those pains that leave you blinded for a
minute.
I said Stop and he kept pushing, ripping his way into me. I said No and he pushed harder. PleaseNo-Stop-It Hurts. I think finally blood provided enough lubrication for him to enter me. I forced
myself to keep quiet, afraid my friends in the bathroom would hear me. It never occurred to me
that crying out would be a good thing. I thought maybe this is what it is supposed to be like. This
is what happens to everyone, this is what the first time is like.
As he fucked me he focused on the pillow behind my head, his eyes glassed over and faraway. He
asked me how I liked the different things he was doing to me, I didn’t have words anymore, he
would kiss me, hold my arms down and keep fucking. It seemed like it would last forever. I knew
I was making sound because the couple in the bathroom let out a series of mockingly sensual “oh
oh oh ah ah ah’s!!” I felt humiliated. I wanted to vomit. I wanted to die.
Finally he came. He smiled as he pulled out of me. I felt like I’d been butchered. He got dressed
and told me he’d meet me downstairs. I got dressed in the dark, lifting myself out of the mess of
blood left on the sheets. I didn’t even know how to go about dealing with the sheets. Stripping
them off and leaving the mattress naked and blood-stained seemed unbearable. My hands shook
and didn’t want work to zip up and button my jeans. I stared at the balcony outside the room and
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wanted to jump off of it. But I noted it was only the second story of the building, so maybe that
wasn’t the best way to go.
The couple came out of the bathroom. My friend said it sounded like it was really good, and I was
lucky because the first time usually hurt. I can’t remember how I responded.
I bled for 3 days after, long and heavy enough to make me think it was my period, but it wasn’t. It
hurt to sit, walk, stand, think.
He’s still my friend. We had sex after that, numerous times. I still thought I loved him. He still
wouldn’t look at me when we did it, always focusing his eyes somewhere to the left of mine. We
were both always plastered enough to not think too much about what we were doing. Sometimes,
when I drank too much, I would cry about how he didn’t love me.
One night, wintertime, we were walking in an alley, en route to a friend’s house. We stopped a
minute for a drink and a smoke, sitting on a cold stoop under the blaring light of a store’s back
door.
“I love you.” I look at him intently, trying to catch his eyes.
“I know you do.” He smoothly took a drag of his cigarette.
“Why don’t you love me back?” I started crying from somewhere deep inside, trying to
hold it in, my chest and throat feeling like they would explode if I didn’t let it out.
“It’s not that I don’t care about you, because I do, I really do. I just don’t love you. I’m
sorry. Don’t cry.” He put his arm around me, taking a swig from a flask with his free
hand. He held me while I cried.
During these moments he would listen to me impatiently, making me feel more pathetic than I
already did, apologizing for not loving me the way I loved him. It made me crazy. Depressed and
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angry and completely confused. How can you love someone that doesn’t love you back? How can
you love someone that hurts you?
I started cutting. When he left for college I had two years of high school to go. He left his ghost to
keep me busy when he couldn’t be there. I thought about him constantly, even though he was
gone, and I just wanted it to stop. My legs and wrists, places I could hide. I would press the blade
down, run it across my skin, and my mind would turn white and silent for a minute or two.
Afterward I would doctor myself up, properly cleaning the wound to avoid infection. I would
cover it up and feel good knowing that I had a secret just beneath my clothes.
I visited him once at college. We were lying in bed and I accidently let my pseudo-punk rock
wrist band slip out of place, the red cuts standing out against my pale skin. He went wild at the
idea of me hurting myself, outraged and confused at the very idea.
“Why did you do this to yourself?” He sat up quickly, looking serious, his eyes wide and
crazed.
“I dunno,” I mumbled, uncomfortable and exposed.
“Talk to me. What is that? What did you do to your arm?”
He was very concerned, which made me laugh, which made him more concerned, which made
me laugh more. I couldn’t figure out at the time what I was laughing at. I figured it was just my
twisted sense of humor, my nervousness, my overflowing insanity. It makes more sense now,
looking back, as things tend to do. He hurt me more than I could ever hurt myself. It was funny to
me that it was okay if he hurt me, but if I hurt myself it was a problem.
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When I see him now, 6 years later, his eyes avoid mine just as they did when we had sex. I want
to tell him that I don’t love him anymore, that I think he raped me, that he fucked my head up for
a long time. But how do you say that to someone?
Memory: After we slept together, before he left for college. He was runner up for homecoming
king his senior year. He looked so cool and punk-rock, his boyish face flushed from all the
excitement. He looked sweet and innocent. Later that night we would roll around in our formal
attire, fucking on the floor of his parent’s basement. We wouldn’t even bother getting completely
undressed, just pulling the top of my dress down and the bottom of it up around my waist. He was
my first. I loved him so much I thought I would die.