*Untitled*

PROLOGUE...


I remember my first time…clear as a bell. I was sixteen, he was eighteen, and we had been dating for about a month. I had promised him that on our one-month anniversary we would have sex. So, when our special day arrived, it was too late to go back or even change my mind.
“How are you doing, baby?” He murmured into my neck.
Well, I certainly knew how he was doing…he was breathing so hard and so loud I thought that his parents would run down the stairs to see if he was having a seizure.
“I’m fine…thanks for asking.” I whispered more to his shoulder than to him.
But in reality, I wasn’t fine. It hurt like hell and I wasn’t feeling any of those good feelings that people describe. In fact, I remember thinking that if sex was like this all the time, celibacy was my only option.
His moans grew louder and he started to up the tempo on his thrusting, all the while asking me if I was there yet. Where the hell was I supposed to be? I was under him, for god’s sake. (I was very naïve back then). He finally finished and I demanded to be driven home. I walked in the door and into my sister’s room and bawled like a baby for a good two hours.
It wasn’t that I didn’t love him anymore or that I thought what we did was wrong…I just felt different. I felt older, less perfect. I felt cool, though because as soon as it got out at school, everyone wanted to know how it was and for the first time, ever, I wasn’t the one that was left behind.


Let me begin by saying that I’m twenty-three years old and a cynic. I can’t quite pin point the exact moment in time that I became a cynic but I’m positive that my first experience of being in love resulted in my “down with men” theory. Now I know what you’re saying, here is another girl that wants to blame all the negative events that have happened to her on someone else, but, honestly, it’s not like that. I REALLY have good reasons, I swear. So, as I’ve already said, I’m twenty-three and I live in a second floor walk-up with my roommate, Steve. He is officially the only man I trust. (I’m sure that he being gay has no bearing on the situation…). I like to dance and I have extremely bad taste in music. I love to shop, particularly for purses and accessories, and mainly on eBay. I love to read and write and I adore Saturday morning cartoons. I love to sing and I love to clean the house wearing nothing but my underwear. I date all the time, with no luck, because I seem to attract the weird ones. You know, the ones that have mom issues, or like comic books, or like to wear women’s underwear for fun or the ones that can only have an orgasm if they masturbate on your breasts. You know, THOSE guys. Well, I’m really getting ahead of myself here…let’s start with when I used to believe in love.

“Were going to Vegas, girls. What do you think about that?” Dad exclaimed one terribly cold December afternoon. He had the biggest smile on his face and in his hand were internet printouts of the various hotels on the strip. He was also loaded down with travel books and restaurant guides for Nevada.
“What…Vegas? Of all the places to go, Dad, you choose Vegas. I can’t even gamble. If you’ve forgotten, I’m only fifteen.” I whined to him in my snotty I’m-so-much-better-than-everyone-else voice.
“Yeah, Dad. There’s going to be nothing for us to do there!” My sister, Lisa, wailed.
“Oh…but that’s where you’re wrong, girls.” Dad sat down with us that evening and what began as an argument, ended with Lisa and me changing our tune and getting pretty damn excited.
The months came and went, until it was finally July 1st, the night before we left. Lisa and I were so excited. We were packing and singing, and actually getting along. Before we knew it, we were on the plane headed for Las Vegas. I will never forget that plane ride. I was sitting there next to my Dad and sister since my mom was in a different row, and my Dad yells really loud, “Look, girls, it’s the Luxor”. It was the most amazing thing…here we were, in a plane, and all you can see from the sky is a hell of a lot of sand and these huge hotels evenly spaced out along a narrow strip. My sister and I oohed and aahed along with my father, as the rest of the plane laughed at our child-like behaviour.
We landed, and walked off the plane and the first thing my family felt was the heat. The first thing my family saw was the world’s largest slot machine. The first things I saw were all the cute boys.
We stayed the first few nights at Circus, Circus which was a hotel in the shape of a big top. The entertainment consisted of circus acts: trapeze artists, clowns and jugglers. It was the lamest thing I had ever seen. My Dad told me to keep in mind that it was one of the oldest hotels on the strip, and one of the cheapest.
The trip didn’t become fun until we moved to the Excalibur Hotel:
The day began with my sister and me taking a jaunt around the hotel because, well, we were bored. We had been tagging along the whole time with Mom and Dad, and, basically, we needed some freedom. We walked toward the arcade and came to a stop at the fountain just outside of the entrance. Here we were, talking away, and one of the cutest boys I had ever seen walked by and smiled at me. I was in awe. Then, he stopped and talked to us.
“Where are you from?” He asked me with his cute American accent.
I blushed and replied with, “from Canada.”
He asked us whereabouts in Canada and I said “British Columbia.” He then said the most absurd thing I’d ever heard in my life. He tilted his cute blond head and looked at me with the bluest eyes I’d ever seen and goes “British Columbia? Isn’t that in England?”
I should have known right then and there that it wasn’t going to work out between the two of us, but I was in love. He captured my heart and we had two blissful days together. That was all the time it took for me to know that I wanted to be with him. He gave me a ring when I left and I gave him my necklace. That was the first and only time I ever saw Joe. We continued on with our “relationship” for about six months until he joined the army and became a paratrooper. I remember crying for weeks after he’d joined because I knew that I wasn’t going to see him again.
There was only one other time Joe ever made me cry. It was about two months into our long-distance relationship when I found out Joe was a Mormon. I had just arrived home from school when I discovered there was a package in the mailbox for me. I ripped it open with such excitement, because it was from HIM, only to discover that it was a book. And not just any book, but the “Book”. I looked at it and I was stumped. I approached my mom in the kitchen.
“Mom…what’s this? It’s from Joe.” I questioned.
She finished washing dishes and came over to my side and took the book out of my hands. “It’s a book about religion…. He’s trying to convert you!” Mom threw the book on the counter and started to laugh. “Callie, just so you know…Mormon’s are allowed to have multiple wives in certain American states.” With that having been said, I ran to my room and bawled, yet again. I talked to him on the phone later on that week regarding his little gift and he explained that he had my best interest at heart.
I didn’t understand back then what he meant by that but I do now. It means that all men think about themselves first and everything else is second. He was thinking about himself, not me. If he had been thinking about me, he would have known that I don’t believe in God, plus he was thinking with his second head: the one that was telling him how neat it would have been to have multiple women around at his beck-and-call.
Joe was my first disappointment in the opposite sex. And he set the stage for all the rest of the men that would walk in and out of my life.

I had established at an early age that I craved, and needed, constant attention. I think this is one of the major reasons why I loved to dance as much as I did. I was a good dancer…alright, I was a great one, and dancing enabled me to be whoever I wanted. See, I was never popular at school but at dance, I was a totally different person. I even managed to date one of the male dancers from the studio. He was totally different than anyone I had ever liked before: He had long hair. We had a brief relationship, for like three weeks, until he realized I was only sixteen and he dumped me for someone more mature. See, I didn’t want to sleep with him…I wasn’t ready at the time but that’s what he wanted. So, he broke up with me for a girl that was able to provide him with that. Fine by me, his long hair was starting to drive me bonkers.

There was always someone. I can’t recall a time that I’d ever been single, or alone. After the dancer, there was the grade 12 student who had his locker across the hall from me. We never dated because he would only write me letters, which he barely had the courage to drop in my locker himself. These letters that he would write me were always so long and they were always drawn in really weird shapes, like circles, or squares, or pyramids, and they took forever to read because you had to keep flipping them over and over. I remember the one time that he called me:
“Hi…is Christina there, please?” Mike said in his strange nasal voice.
“Uhhh….yep, this is her.” I replied.
“Hey Christina…It’s Mike from school…I have the locker across from yours. Did you get my letters?”
“Yeah…thank you for all those letters. They must have taken you a long time to write?”
“Yeah…they did.”
(LONG PAUSE)
“Uuuhhhh…Christina, I was wondering If you wanted to go out with me this weekend? We could see a movie and maybe go out for dinner?”
“Ummm…sure. When do you want to pick me up?”
“Oohhh…I don’t have a car or my license. I thought we could take the bus.”
With that said, I remember thanking him politely for the invitation and then hanging up as soon as I could, without sounding like a bitch. But seriously, a date with the bus as our transportation…come on…who was he kidding?

My views have long since changed on material matters, but the thought of the “ideal” person still remains. Is there that perfect person for everyone, and, if so, why can’t I find mine?