The man that I lost my virginity to was French and he was absolutely divine. He was so shockingly good looking that I made the very backward (and teenage) assumption that this meant we were going to have fabulous sex. Fabulous sex? I barely knew how to kiss, let alone have sex.
But he could walk on his hands and he was on holiday without parents. This alone was the absolute end as far as I was concerned. It didn’t get much better than that. By day, we sat on the beach drinking beers and white coffee - ‘Una cerveza por favor?’ and ‘Café con leche Senor?’ How grown up can a fifteen-year-old feel about ordering drinks for herself? Very. Believe me.
Later on, after my captors (the grown ups) had fallen asleep and I had fled from the villa overlooking the sea, we smoked copious Fortuna cigarettes together and danced to Laura Branigan as she sung the words to ‘Self Control’….
Oh, the night is my world
City light painted girl
In the day nothing matters
It's the night time that flatters
In the night, no control
Through the wall something's breaking
Wearing white as you're walkin'
Down the street of my soul
For the love of god will you listen to this song and tell you it doesn’t move you in the way that it might move you if you were a fifteen year old girl?!
We would end the night back on the beach, kissing and smoking other combustible products that can be purchased in Spain. Sometimes we would take ourselves up to the hills above the town and lie on a bed of pine needles whilst listening to The Cure on his crappy old cassette player.
Fumbling around with him under the moonlight in his sleeping bag, I still remember feeling what a man felt like for the first time and being pretty freaked out about it. This really was naught to fifty in about five seconds. I had barely kissed a man up until that point. But I didn’t want to miss my chance. I didn’t want to miss my opportunity to lose it to Adonis beneath the trees in Spain. Even if I was labouring under the illusion that looks really do matter that much.
Needless to say, when the moment came, it wasn’t much to write home about. No matter, because that’s not what I remember now. I only recall the sights, sounds and smells of a truly unique time in anyone’s life.
These days I am touched by something very different I am pleased to say. Kindness, patience and humour all add up to sexiness in a way that looks never could. Not that that aesthetics don’t matter. Of course they do, it’s just that deep down, bona fide sexiness comes from somewhere deep inside and it’s all about a feeling, not just a look.
All this is a long way of telling you that today’s story is from a French man. Perhaps he is my French man but fifteen years older. Perhaps he too is still transported by the smell of pine trees at night, or the sound of a song that echoed across the Mediterranean in the summer of ‘83, and maybe not to a time when he had the greatest sex of his life, but to a time when he was writing life-changing history. His own.
Virginity loss. You can’t beat it for invoking memories.
Big Tom. Born 1953.
Since I met A, I lost my virginity. For sure she was the first one. I had been in love with others. S. was a kind of first love because she answered to my desire. Other nice girls did answer to it, some rejected it, but we didn't make love. I wanted to be loved and I was afraid of the thing itself - touching, being touched, taken, wounded, leaving my amour, defenseless, that was my idea of it.
What I mostly remember is - excitation – a quickly ending voluptuous sensation - a smell that I would keep on my hands some days before washing. I left girls quickly those days, or they left me unsatisfied, wandering.
Then I met again gals and eventually got married because B. was pregnant. We were together since winter holidays, my mother had bought us our mattress ... it was a matter of weeks. I'm a grandfather now, happy to live with her after all these years.
But now, since I met C. I have a new idea of my virginity. It's not as if we never made love. All the contrary, as I met freedom and joy and lightness and oneself's gift with her. Once again.
All of a sudden I was absolutely a virgin, anew, just beginning to learn something about our bodies and how they met. Now I was - I still am - in longing, craving and amazement. My sensations have gone deep, under my skin, next to my heart inside.
C. wanted me, I didn't say no, she said she loved me, I knew I would not love here enough. She wanted to be an accomplished woman, a mother.
I did write about that to C. We're not making love any more as I was feeling like split in two, unable to fondle more than one woman at that part of my life. Did she understand? Maybe, she still adores me, but did not tell much about the subject.
This is not a miracle, not new, nor rare. I just wanted to write about it. And I'm sending it to you because I realized it was like that for me, that virginity sensation, only when I read, amazed, your project site, dunno from what random clicks.
Born in France 55 yrs a go! Thank you Kate for what you do.
Big Tom
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