Touching My First Time for the Last Time

I lost my virginity in New Jersey at a strip mall motel replete with a red heart-shaped bathtub and a water bed. I thought it was the most romantic place in the world because I was with the first man I ever trusted, Johnnie.

Now here I was, 33 years later, sitting with him on the front porch of his house in our tiny beach town on the Jersey Shore, laughing and crying while drinking a beer as we recalled our first time. Johnnie sat next to me in his wheelchair. He couldn’t actually laugh or drink as he had A.L.S., but he could blink his responses through the screen attached to his chair.

What a horrible disease A.L.S. is. Over the course of four years, the most vibrant, handsome man lost his ability to speak, eat and walk and would soon lose his ability to breathe.

Though we hadn’t seen each other in 30 years, our families were still close, so I made a special visit to the town where our family spent every summer since I was a child to see him one last time.

My mother and I had come to say goodbye that morning. After an hour of forced conversation, we were still stuck with pleasantries. I knew when we got up to leave that I needed to say something I had wanted to express for a long time. I bent down and whispered in his ear, “How lucky were we? You taught me many things, but a huge one was trust. And — sex.”

He replied with the smiling emoji that has hearts for eyes.

On that night in the motel room with John, I finally trusted and was blessed to discover my own body’s pleasure and sex borne out of deep vulnerability. I was finally able to let go.