The ten year anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death is in a few days, and I find it wildly appropriate that today, while rummaging around old shoeboxes looking for colored paper to use in a scrapbook I plan to make for Leta (stop looking at me like that, yes I scrapbook and I am proud of it) I found the following excerpt from a letter I wrote to a friend when I was 19 years old:
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One month after my seventeenth birthday, eight months after the first time I’d noticed the way his smile would scoop tense lines into the shadows of his cheekbones, David and I went on a date, or what I guess you could call a date. We rented the fifth or sixth Star Trek movie, I can’t remember which, and went back to his empty house on a cool Saturday evening. I left his house that night having participated in my first kiss. It was perhaps the scariest evening of my life. With Cobain screeching “Lithium” on Headbanger’s Ball in the background and a shaft of hazy light from the hallway lurking on the south wall, David kissed me in I guess what he would consider sensual fury, what I would consider beastly uncoordination. At about midnight I pulled out of his driveway never to see him again, well, never to see him for a long, long time. I was really messed up from the experience even though all we did was smooch. In the eyes of the Church, I thought, I must be a heathen, a stiffnecked wayward, a virtual Lamanite. For about three months I lingered on the brink of self-destruction. David was gone forever far far away in a land called Caltech. My innocence was gone forever far far away with Nirvana as my only witness.
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The first thing I thought when I read through this was Holy fuck, could I have been more annoying? Who uses words like “wayward” and “stiffnecked”? My first instinct was to burn this letter so that no one, including my husband, would ever know that I had put pen to paper and written the phrase scoop tense lines like some literary fuckwad English major who is terrified of being found out that she is a total fraud.
And then I remembered just how distraught I was at that first kiss, how I seriously thought I was going to hell because my tongue had entered another human being’s mouth for purposes other than life support. And I so totally and completely don’t want my daughter to ever have to go through that sort of self-loathing.
So I’m going to keep this letter — a single-spaced account of my whole sexual non-history from ages 14-18 that is written in one whole paragraph and stretches over seven pages — and hope that when the time comes I’ll be able to teach my daughter about making healthy personal decisions about sex and about relationships, and about never using the word “uncoordination” because it DOESN’T EXIST.
Also, this weekend I’m going to break out all my old Nirvana CDs (did I just use the word OLD?) and continue Leta’s indie music indoctrination. I think it’s important that she know that Jesus don’t want her for a sunbeam.