It would either be this day last year, or the next, depending on whether you count the leap year or not, but 365 days ago I kissed her for the first time. For weeks I’d been sneaking out the house to go and see her, or convincing my parents that it was okay for me to go out and walk the dog, that I would come back. I’d not been allowed out since 31st October because they thought that I was going to try and commit suicide again, or at least that’s what they told me, I don’t know their real reason anymore because I discovered that my father had been talking about me to my school and told them that he didn’t think I had done it at all. Thanks Dad, it’s nice to know you’re there for me when I can see no alternative but to die. At least I can understand now why you wanted to let me see the sadistic bastard of a shrink again even though I’d already begged the hospital staff not to make me see him, and told them that I desperately wanted help, but not from him. That’s a story for a different day though, this day a year ago I started to be able to put all that in the past.
I was on another of my walks where I was allowed out for a short while. It was probably something like twenty minutes I’d been allowed, which was marginally better than the ten minutes I’d been given a week or two ago. She said that I could go around her house, and she stood at the bottom of her steps and showed me in, I’d been there only once before, and being there scared me. The whole concept of going into other peoples’ houses scares me because I didn’t know how they work, I’d never lived in a house. And I knew that the oldest of her two brothers was a violent nutter. We went straight up to her room and I awkwardly sat on the edge of her bed, not knowing what to do.
There were the biggest give away signs that you could have ever gotten, she’d been hugging me for the past few weeks, almost in tears when I’d hugged her after her ex had been shouting at her, and even there then when there was no real need for it, she was hugging me. It was cold, although not as cold as it is this year, so she wrapped herself up in her duvet and laid down sideways across the double bed. For some reason I decided that it would be a good idea to lay next to her, and she put her hand out for me to rest my head on. A couple of moments later when I realised what she was doing, my face was inches from hers, just like it had been the time before, and I was fighting with every fibre of my body not to close the gap and kiss her. Everything I had was being put into controlling myself, because although I hoped that she would be alright with it, I thought there was the possibility of her wanting it too, I wasn’t sure, and I thought it was more likely that she would run a million miles from me, because how many nineteen year old women go around kissing fifteen year old kids?
Just as I’d managed to convince myself that I would just look like a stupid, sexually frustrated child and told myself that I could never act on my feelings, something changed. I could sense the gap between us closing, I could sense that she was, slowly, getting closer. My eyes had been closed since we’d laid down, and I had no way of telling how close she was. Still I held back, too scared to pull away, and too desperate not to ruin everything to move closer. Then her lips met mine and I couldn’t think any more.
The rest of the evening is all just too foggy to remember. I can remember kissing her for the first time when she was snuggled up in her duvet, without a duvet cover, like it was a cocoon, my arms awkwardly around it. I remember kissing her when we were sitting upright and my phone vibrating — it was my ex — and her asking whether I needed to reply to the text, and me saying no, and going back to kissing her. And then the kiss on the top of my forehead as I left. I can vaguely remember the shit that went down when my ex found out about it all. They’d asked, they’d seemed jovial about it, betting me a tenner that something would happen, but in the end, when it did, they weren’t up for dealing with it.
That evening was worth all the pain and heartache of the next few days and weeks from them though. The first kisses that me and Tiff had together were most certainly worth it. The day after was the first of my GCSE History exam, and I got to school that morning, hugging the jumper that I’d worn the day before — it smelt of her — and not knowing whether to be ecstatically happy, or nervous. In the end I spent half of the exam staring blankly out of the window and not doing anything, yet somehow managed to walk away with an A. Might have been an A* actually, I really can’t remember now. I answered a question and a half before I even realised which topic it was on, either Liberal Reforms, the Homefront or Womens’ Suffrage It was Womens’ Suffrage but I think not realising helped because I wasn’t trying to just use information about one specific part of the time frame, but rather thinking of it all. Maybe it was just because we’d learned most about Suffrage because our Head of History had gotten a tip off that it might be more likely for that topic to come up, and our school was founded by Millicent Fawcett. There you go, you can now stalk me to my previous school now, but I wouldn’t bother, all the teachers hated me there.
I’m hoping that Tiff will come round tonight after she finishes work, because I never get to see her, and I want to see her today in particular. I know I should really count tomorrow as the anniversary because it’s the same date, but I’ve only just realised that today’s the 21st and not the 22nd and it’s only because it was a leap year that it’s wrong. It’s 365 days afterwards, and in my book that makes it a year. And at 5.49am this morning it was exactly 365.2425 days later so it definitely has been a year since that day. I suppose if we’re going to get that pernickety about it then I’d have to work out the exact time that it happened. But I can’t. So that’s that.
Alexander 