Firsts.

A good friend of mine has yet to receive her first kiss. She insists on it being absolutely perfect, dream like, and practically impossible expectations of a first kiss. There are so many firsts in our individual lifetimes and we have so many expectations of these firsts. Unfortunately most of them are completely ignored.
When I was little i used to practice kissing on my pillow. I don't know why, I just did. I wanted to be good for when the love of my life came along and swept me off my feet with his perfect kisses. I pictured the whole cliche mess: a sunset, giggling, talking about the deepest darkest parts of our souls, and just being happy. They were perfectly acceptable expectations. The reality was my first kiss was with a random boy named Anthony who thought it would be funny to ask out the nerdiest sixth grader. He kissed me behind a dumpster and then left to giggle about it with his friends. We never really talked after that. I moved to a different city and we never talked again. Just like that, a milestone in my life was taken from me at the snap of his fingers.
I look at my friend and how she has yet to experience this and I am almost jealous at her capability to remain a hopeless romantic. I'm not saying I'm unhappy with how my life has turned out so far at all, there's just a little piece inside of me that wishes my first kiss was a little more sentimental. She has so much hope and so much expectation. Then again, the only way to see through the glass clearly is to have a little smack of reality. With the onset of failed expectations comes the clarity of life. You realize that things can be to shit, but that just means you see things for what they are. With this ability, you are able to avoid the down sides of being a hopeless romantic. The heartbreaks become less often and you expectations are no longer put on something that you would not expect to fulfill them. Expectations do not always have to be a disappointment, as log as you put those expectations in the right person.
There are a billion more firsts I could talk about. All teenagers know them. First time having sex. First time smoking a blunt. First time you get your heart broken. That's just to name a few. Then there's that occasional first time of having to make an insanely important decision. My boyfriend of almost two years is having to make a drastic decision that will affect the rest of his life. A first for him because things have always been smooth sailing. He always knew exactly what to do, exactly what his point of view was. He was never torn. But for the first time, he finds himself on two sides of a decision and suddenly he has no expectations, just full set reality.
That's just what first time experiences do to you. They take you for a ride and spit you out somewhere. This random place varies in all shapes and sizes of regret, disappointment, fear, and, surprisingly, relief. They have the affect of changing the course of your life and the content of your character. People toss them around so lightly. Like a helium filled balloon. Eventually it will pop, and the apparent lightness of it will disappear. Good news is that the sudden POP only lasts a few moments. It hits you unexpectedly and you sit there wondering "What the fuck just happened?". But once it settles and your mind wraps around the idea, everything continues. But there's that slight change, the shift in attitude towards things. You're a lot more careful with the next balloon. You didn't like that feeling of when the last one POPPED. It's a cycle. A weird one and certainly more effective than we realize.
I wouldn't go back and change how my first kiss went. In sixth grade I was an ass kissing push over. Once this kid screwed me over, I grew a pair of lady balls and finally disregarded all the bullshit people through at me. My skin thickened and I turned into someone who valued their firsts a lot more. This goes for everything else in my life. I have no regrets with the way my firsts went. The memories are far too precious to me to regret, good or bad. They are sculptors to who we are, why would you want to change that? No matter how damaged or how sheltered, there is beauty in all of over imperfections. Firsts help with this beauty. Why change them?

**Of course I realize that there are a lot worse ways firsts can go about, this post is merely from my own experience**