In my story American Backroads, I talk about the first girl I ever really dated in high school. Her name was Lynn but I called her 'Heidi' in the story and wrote these and a few other paragraphs about her.
Thursday night after evensong, I smiled at Heidi as we stood to leave the chapel. She fell into step beside me. Who knew it was so easy to pick up a girl? I was panicked. I gestured toward the lake to suggest taking the long way back to our cabin and she nodded. It was still going back to our cabin, but there was a much shorter route by way of the road. Heidi never spoke, but even if she had, I wouldn't have heard her. The noise of my heart beating in my ears would have drowned it out.
As we walked, Heidi stayed close to me. Really close. Then the back of her hand touched the back of my hand. It was electric. First contact! And we stayed that way. We walked all the way back to the cabin with the backs of our hands touching each other. It was not until we opened the door and went in where all the other kids were breaking silence that I became aware of any other sensations in my body. All my awareness for the past twenty minutes had been on that square inch of skin that was touching Heidi.
In reality, she was the first girl I dated. The first girl I held hands with. We dated through the first half of my sophomore year and then just drifted apart. But that experience is one I have thought of often. It's come up a couple of times in my writing. I called her 'Rhonda' in my first published mystery, For Blood or Money. (It's the sequel to Wayzgoose's For Money or Mayhem that just finished posting.) It was Dag relating his experience in high school.
The dance ended and I walked Rhonda home. It was after 11:00 and we had midnight curfews, so we weren't talking much as we walked through the Ballard neighborhood where we lived.
Then it happened.
The backs of our hands touched as we walked along. Once. Twice. The third time they seemed to stick together and we walked with just the backs of our hands touching for nearly two blocks.
And we didn't say a word.
I'm not even sure I breathed in that whole time.
A sixteen-year-old boy can transfer every nerve ending in his body to a single square inch of skin that is touching a girl for the first time. Not that we'd never touched each other before. But for those two blocks, there was no other reason to be touching each other than that we wanted to.
And it completely took my breath away.
For forty years after that night, every time I thought of it everything around me stood still and I lived in that square inch of contact. It is the single moment in a lifetime that you realize that someone outside your own skin can become so important that the rest of the world disappears. And that first realization happens only once.
There is never a second first time.
A profound real-life experience from fifty-three years ago I've held dear ever since.
I've received word that Lynn/Heidi/Rhonda passed away after a long illness yesterday.
I can still feel the touch of her hand.