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3 ...You can't make your heart feel something it won't...  I Can't Make You
Love Me
   I had never gotten around to telling Lilly that I didn't know whether
she was my first time or not, because I was still unsure as to what
counted, and for how much.  When I was 15, I'd had a six-month relationship
with a 17-year-old named Iris.  She'd had several boyfriends, but for me
she was my first love, and I thought about her more or less constantly in
the years after.  Iris and I never actually had intercourse, but we spent
many nights in the basement of her house or mine with the lights off and
the radio on, dry-humping through our underwear, feeling under each other's
shirts; and Iris, on three separate occasions, took my member in her mouth
and tried valiantly to get me off; but for some reason (nerves?  tension?
inexperience?) I was never able to orgasm from this.  I didn't know if that
counted as sex, especially since I never completed the act with Iris except
when I was alone and picturing her in my mind; I suspected it did, but I
wasn't sure how to reconcile the concepts "I have had sex" and "I am a
virgin", so I never mentioned it to Lilly.  Whatever.  I loved Iris, I know
I did.  She was the first, she was burned into my soul the way no one else
ever could be.  I'm pretty sure I know now what love is, I might have then,
too.  All I know for real is that I loved being with her, and the day she
broke up with me was the worst day of my life until Lilly left me.  That
day, the day Iris told me she couldn't be with me anymore, was a mosaic
inside me; hard, permanent bits of faded color that jabbed into my soul
like a faceful of broken glass.  The only part of that memory that's smooth
is the hours of crying that blended the daylight hours into the night.
   The bigger picture, I guess, was that I was alone again, and knew I was
going to be alone for the rest of my life.  Both of the women whose
interest I'd managed to capture had left me.  I knew there was something
wrong with me that prevented a woman from staying interested.  With this as
a foundation, I grew too depressed to hold any job for long, sloughing my
way through one dead end after another.  
  
rj_chapter03