Of Junk and Broken Hearts

The Low is always there, stroking my lower back in a comforting manner, because he is a friend, I know him, he hurls his black hole body at my centre when he comes, devours me and spits me out, what is left of me, weeks, maybe months later. But he always spits me back out. It is a deal we have.

I wish I could say that I chase other people, that I chase the essence of what they are, that I chase a soul mate, my other half, my own completeness. But I don't. I chase only what they can give me. The high. Not the thrill of the chase, not the hasty ripping of proverbial bodices nor the pained looks that inevitably ensue on that morning after which inevitably always ensues.

I chase that feeling of a first kiss where your heart explodes out of your chest, leaving you light as a feather without a centre, pushing your essence into your fingertips as they caress the hair of your loved one. That feeling of looking at someone and knowing something with a certainty that science could never allow itself to provide about anything.

Ever since I was a child, my mind has walked this path. I was the one who would find ingenous ways to casually pass a certain person's house five times a day, who would hang out on the corner a block down from it, not to follow them, just to see them as they walked out of their home.

My friends did this too, when we were young, pretty, freckled and still had bruised knees from running though the streets, and bruised lower arms from giving each other Chinese burns when we disagreed on which boy was du jour at any given time. But our hearts were virginal, pink and throbbing, we practised cutting them out of our chests and giving them away, but it was all a mime. Our hearts remained our own, at least for the time being.

Every week there was a new boy for them, but already then, I was not like the others. My first love was given to another girl in my high school class. Her name was Heather and she was blonde and popular. She had dimples in her cheeks when she smiled, and also, I would later discover, one dimple just above the teardrop shape of her left buttock. I did not call it being in love at the time. I just knew I had to be where Heather was, she did not have to talk to me or acknowledge me, let alone touch me, I just needed to know she was there, to feel her peachy skin touching the same air that was touching mine.

I had no articulated desire for pleasures of the flesh yet, and though Heather freely gave herself away to a new boy every second month as the last one lost novelty value, I felt no jealousy, because I had no idea what they were doing inside their steamed up cars and behind the smokers' bike shed at half time during school football matches. I just looked at her, smelled her Teen perfume and knew that there was something, something.

Of course we were friends. Everyone was friends with Heather, and she rotated between her crew of girls, allowing each to court her in private just often enough to keep us hanging on. Because I was not the only one pining for her, though the others realised it as little as I did. There were boys, but I kept them at arms lenght. They never seemed that exciting, not like Heather.

It was thanks to one of her short-lived boyfriends, whose name I can no longer remember, that Heather initiated me to the world of steamed-up cars and how those straws would end up matted into one's hair, drawing suspicious looks from my mother, who never asked, I don't think she wanted to know.

Heather had invited me over to her house, her parents were out, and she was planning to raid their booze cabinet, a regular activity which I can see in retrospect did much for her myth and popularity.

And her parents were out, but she had also invited her boyfriend. I remember that he had blonde hair like her, and blue eyes contrasting her brown ones. But his facial features are erased from my mind. The wine was expensive, and chilled in the fridge. I was not used to drinking, and at any rate, I was drunk with the excitement I always felt while at Heather's house. And then she was leaning up to me on the sofa, producing some of her crocodile tears over a grade C paper she had not managed to talk up to a B+, then proceeding to pull her top up, asking me to touch her, which I did.

The warmth of her girly skin, the apparent intimacy of her confession of desperation over the C grade which she whimpered into in my ear, her breath on my neck which quickened as I felt the surprising heaviness of her small breast in my hand, that was when I gave my heart to her, and the experience branded itself on the pleasure centre of my brain as an image of perfection.

It lasted for about ten seconds, though they seemed to go on for too long, as I felt a strange yearning quell up from between my legs, for what I did not quite know. I looked up for a second, and saw her boyfriend, he had not vanished into thin air like it had seemed to me.

He was still there, he had spread his legs on the chair and was furiously rubbing a bulge in his shorts. And then I realised, even in my naivete, that it had all started out as a game, a dare maybe, for him, or maybe for her. Heather was known to bore easily.

And then my heart broke, for the first time, and I knew the Low, too, for the first time, as a black hole spread across my diaphragm, slowly, creepingly, making me cold.

But Heather then did to me what her boyfriend was doing to himself, pushing her soft girl hand up under my jersey skirt, into my cotton underwear, moist with secret juices I had not realised were gushing forth.

I found my body could keep going without a heart, in fact its extraction had somehow deepened my desire, I kept stroking her breasts, and then leaned over to kiss them, I wanted to devour them, drink their plump half grapefruit shapes to quench this horrible thirst which was coming over me, seemingly from nowhere.

Heather was also returning the favour of freeing my breasts by pulling my spaghetti strapped top down, and pushed me off her own chest while leaning down to suck the nipples which I found were rock hard. I can still remember the cool draft from their open patio door that rushed into my lungs as I caught my breath, her tongue slithering around my stiff nipples with a level of expertise which I have later thought was incredible, given her 18th birthday not a full month earlier.

I saw the boyfriend again, he had freed his cock from his shorts and was now unashamedly stroking it, his other hand cupping his balls, tightly creeping up to his shaft, smooth and so hard he had to wrench it from his flat belly to get a grip on it. He started groaning and stood up, stepping out of his shorts and moving towards me, still wearing his white t-shirt and socks.

At the same time, Heather knelt in front of me, spred my legs quite violently and thrust the three middle fingers of her right hand up my virgin pussy. "Yeah Heather, baby, you've done it, you've readied her for me," I heard her boyfriend say, and I closed my eyes.

But Heather did not stop. She put her soft lips on my clit and sucked it, flicking her tongue over it the same way she had my nipples. She started fucking me with her hand, and I felt pressure building inside my abdomen, almost filling the void there, all my blood gushed to my groin as I came for the first time ever, squirting my juices in Heather's face, pumping her fingers with my pussy.

The world was swimming arond me, but yet when I opened my eyes I saw Heather clearly in front of me, her hand was working between her legs, and she was moaning as she kept licking and hand fucking me, suddenly jerking and withdrawing her fingers to clasp my hip instead, burying her tongue deep inside me as she came. "You're enjoying that more than you do when I fuck you, aren't you, get off her!" Heather's boyfriend pushed her aside, and she fell to the floor.

He then kneeled down in front of me as I slid down the sofa and leaned over me, fiddling with his crotch between us, I felt something hot and slippery touch me which I only later realised was his cock, his breath in one ear, heavier, deeper than Heather, not like a kitten, like a sleepy, drugged animal.

Then there was swearing, as I felt a sticky, hot spray across my naked belly and the boyfriend collapsed across me without having completed his mission, frantically rubbing himself, unable to stop even as hischance to deflower me passed. I remember the smell of boy, sweat, exhaustion. I can't remember how I got home.

And ever since that day, I chase that high. That moment of perfection, where you are complete, cocooned in with that person whose skin is like hot coal to your hands. The moment shatters, but it is worth it every time.