The Story – dead

I’m 16 and it’s the heat of summer.

I am loving life, I have friends all around me and  I’m going to house parties nonstop. Kissing guys against piles of bricks, laughing louder than I ever had before and enjoying my youth to the full.

I met a guy at college, I was shy and had red hair and I always thought he was out of my league, thankfully he thought different, he was my first gay everything. Gay love, gay sex, real heartbreak. I did love him, I was just so naïve back then, I didn’t really know how it all worked and all I had to go on was, well…nothing. I found the doubt to be the hardest emotion to deal with in this new alien relationship, and I pretty much made the rest up as I went along. I definitely became a needy crazy guy at the end of it all, I even apologised and begged him to take me back when I’d done nothing wrong but get dumped by him, all because he was all I had known, he was my first and I didn’t want things to end, besides, aren’t we all a little crazy after our first?

It wasn’t all bad though, one of my favourite memories was sitting on the island in my kitchen, electricity ran down my spine and you could feel the static In the air, my legs around his waist and his arms around mine, both grinning like fools, forehead on forehead like cats that had just gotten the cream, I guess that’s because we had. I’d just had sex for the first time 10 minutes earlier with someone who made me feel so special and deserving of love, the sun was shining through the kitchen window as he kissed me again.

Love back then came in the form of reduced ‘I love you’ mugs from the local Tesco, and bunches of daffodils after lessons, that’s all I needed in that moment because I had something worth more than anything money could buy. I had love.

 

That love wasn’t supposed to last, and it didn’t, like I said, he dumped me, and it hurt like hell. I remember the change in the air in that last week like a sickness setting in, a stomach bug that no pill could shake. I held his hand under the table at lunch and I remember the pleading in my eyes as I silently begged him to look me in them. He didn’t, and little did I know, he would never look me in the eye the same way again. He was waiting in the corridor for me to finish my lesson, I knew what was coming instantly because my heart had stopped beating before he had even reached my locker.

Dead.

 I died right there for the first time.

 

 It wouldn’t be the last.