Monday, August 28, 2006
"I Remember You"

Reminiscences by Jason Heath-Fitzgerald:

I Lost my virginity when I was very young. Younger than most, maybe... I'm not sure, but it seems young to me looking back. It was with a girl at one of those awkward preteen parties. The kind of party kids had with their parent's permission, well before they actually knew what partying really is.

However loosing my virginity is not what's on my mind. There are other things besides sex that I remember from the past that affected me much more than loosing my virginity or even the first time I had sexual relations with another man.

There is a moment from my past that is blazed into my memory forever: the first time I ever held hands with another man. Now, to some this might seem trite, but there are still times that I go back in time and re-live that moment and all of the feelings associated with it. I can feel that sick, yet excited nervousness in my gut and my heart beating hard enough to hear pounding in my ears.

I was fourteen maybe fifteen, so was he. We had already done the sleep-over nights and, in turn, had discovered each others bodies, but that was not signs of love, it was the horny excitement of young boys. What is a true sign of affection happened on the banks of Keystone Lake.

The town of Mannford lay on the edge of the lake and there were brief moments that we would escape to the privacy of the water's edge, away from prying eyes and where we could be ourselves, by that I mean we could be 'gay'.

He was my excitement in life then. I thought of him always. Pencil thin, long dark, shaggy hair always wearing black jeans and Rock T-shirts. We were alive when we were together. I can remember looking across the biology table only to find him staring at me and waiting to lock eyes, which would fairly well shut out anything that was happening around us. We had tendencies to be trouble makers, I'm sure there are teachers that still remember us... but I digress.

That day; it was Fall the water was lapping the shoreline and I can remember we were laughing a lot. I'm not sure what we were laughing about, now looking back, I figure it was something wicked we'd done or some kind of trouble we had made at school, we always thought ourselves very clever. I do remember smoking a joint behind the tennis courts that day, but that was too common-place to have put us into such a jovial mood.

We had sneaked away from town as soon as the last bell rang at school & found ourselves walking down the shoreline, tripping over rocks and 'accidentally' bumping into each other often. On one of his stumbles over a large spider infested rock, he reached out & grabbed my hand to steady himself, which he did with much over-acting. When he was steady footed again, he looked up into my face, but didn't let go of my hand, instead he squeezed. My stomach was in knots and my heart was pounding, I could have stood there like that forever.

Moments passed which surely were only seconds, but seemed like hours to me. He finally pulled me out of my trance by starting to walk again, but he did not let go of my hand. This was something I'd dreamed about. It was something I watched the boys and girls do back at school. Those kids seemed so in love, now I knew what it felt like and I was on top of the world.

I really can't remember how far we walked. It wasn't until today that I remembered how it ended. We heard a truck somewhere above us where a city street lay just inside the trees that lined the rocky waters edge. That sound brought us back into reality; he dropped my hand as if it was a glowing, hot coal and I stepped several steps to the right of him to show that there was space between us. It was over, but it wasn't the last time we got to enjoy holding hands.

Looking back I can see that day, the lake, his Metallica T-Shirt, his dark grungy hair whipping around his head in the wind coming off the lake and it makes me feel those same feelings I felt that day and it makes me want to cry for missing him to this day. We were together when we first discovered that it was okay to love someone of the same sex. We realized in those moments together that the rest of the world were the ones who were wrong, not us.

What a person feels at that age of their lives feels like love, however, I think we all know that it's not true love. What I felt at that moment in my life was a kind of love, it was the most love I could have imagined at that age, so I treasure the memories of it.

Over the years I have run through scenarios in my head, more times than I can tell you. Had things ended up different, how would our relationship turned out? The possibilities are endless, but any of you who know me know that I have a very vivid sense of reality about me, and in reality I believe that if he had not passed away we would have shared a couple more good years and then probably grown apart. Who actually grows up and spends the rest of their life with their first love anyway? People change so dramatically in those years, there is so much growth. I know our lives would have taken us different places and there is a possibility that it would have ended poorly. What an awful thing it would be to have these wonderful memories of the first time I held hands and it to be with someone whom I later ended up angry with or disliking.

I comforted myself in later years by realizing that since he passed away while we were together at 16, my feelings for him will now never change. He was a beautiful person, he was my first love and he was the first man to hold my hand. I'll never forget that.

It was a wonderful feeling.