Teddy

This 19 year old boy, Melvin, came over to my house last night. I met him on the Internet and he is this cute, shy Puerto Rican boy with lovely skin to touch who graduated high school in June and still lives with his family. My apartment has now been baptized; sex has been had in my new residence; things feel better here. He was young and that youngness showed through several times, him looking very nervous when he first came into my house, not really knowing what to do with himself, later showing when after making out and starting to undress he said that he wanted to get to know me before we did anything. Frustrated at first, I lay back on my pillows, making conversation to make him feel like he wasn't a slut, a body being used just as a body, and then remembered being young, younger, remembered those early sexual experiences and how then I wanted similar things from them, had different ideas about what they should be. He had this cute smile and talking to him, looking at him, remembering what things felt like not that many years ago, I enjoyed the conversation, the getting to know each other before anything happened. I also enjoyed the anything happening.

Afterwards, I biked away from my house toward the bank and on the way, my back tire popped in a major fashion, becoming totally flat. There seemed to be some symbolism here. I wasn't sure what it was, but it seems as if it signified something after having this nice sexual experience. Earlier in the day, I had read J.D. Salinger's "Teddy" and so life seemed important and unimportant, its unimportance the source of its importance. After reading that story, I tested negative for HIV, which was a relief since the story and my having randomly read it that day, its message, seemed to me to be a foreshadowing of something ominous, of me falling into an empty pool, cracking my head open, and someone approaching the pool scared, hearing my sister's scream, the scream "highly acoustical, as though it were reverbeating within four tiled walls." And for a story that takes as one of its themes notions of space and how physical objects and spaces seem to be so only because of logic, that reference to the four tiled walls and that "as though" doubting its reality seemed really significant.