FIRST LOVE by Andrea Gibson | Lord of the Butterflies I don’t think I ever really kissed any boys. I think my tongue had just been punching their tongues. But as soon as you loved me all my callous went away. My hands so soft it hurt to pray. You’d pick me up at my Catholic college and I’d sleep for hours until we reached your house. The first time in my life I’d ever rested, the first time I didn’t have to play a role I’d never really wanted to get. That’s the medicine it is to be finally seen by someone. I’d crack a smile and you’d point to my chest and say, What just broke? I’d throw my body in the river but you’d say my name right and I’d become a stone that skipped. Do you remember the first record where we didn’t have to change the pronouns to sing along? We’d gone so many years without music that knew us. Music that knew you could arch your back and I’d have proof that the earth was round. Bless who we were then. Bless who we still are. My straight friends tease me because all my best friends are my ex loves, but a wise heart told me it’s the most tender part of queerness—how we’ve all lost so much family when we find people we call family, we’ll do almost anything to not let go. Thank goodness for the ice storm that trapped us in that cheap hotel where I drank an entire bottle of something awful, and with my fisherman’s accent that I hadn’t yet chased away, I finally told you I’d loved you since we were 15 playing basketball under the street lights beside the poorest part of the sea. The ice storm froze the world outside into a photograph of the past while I kneeled down and kissed my future onto your kneecaps. Two decades talking to Jesus. That was the first time I heard him talk back. Months later, church bells ringing through my dorm room, I wrote my senior thesis about you and no one knew how hard I was praying to stop hiding myself in metaphor, to be brave enough to carve the truth into the chapel door. Only you can imagine how much time I spent picking out my outfit the night you took me to my first queer bar in Portland, Maine––the biggest city I’d ever walked through. I was so excited and so scared that we’d be spotted, or killed, on our way inside, we sat in the parking lot for over an hour till I changed my mind and you drove me home, mascara pouring down my brand new boy shirt. I couldn’t have guessed there’d ever come a time like the winter we traveled to Blue Hill to visit your mother. Asleep when we arrived after midnight, she’d lit our room with candles and rested a joint in the center of the bed. Neither of us were any good at smoking but we pulled her welcome into our lungs like it was one hundred years of oxygen. Up until then we didn’t know anyone in the world would celebrate us wiping the steam from the glass to see each other blushing in the same bathroom mirror in the morning. I was thinking about that a few months ago when I was invited back to my catholic college to read my poems for the first time. You, in the front row, near the nuns and the school president and the teacher who had given me an A on the manuscript I had been too terrified to write your name in. Mandy, I know so much has not gotten easier. I know so much has not gotten better, but that moment knocked the wind out of me––Time finally being the kind of father we all deserve. The world turning its porch light on for us. It was so bright I could feel the freckles on my 15-year-old face warming in its glow. I could feel hope traveling backward to find us, to whisper into our chests, There will be music for you one day. by Andrea Gibson