Tristan from Germany
I was six when I first fell madly in love.
Her name was Sabrina and we would see each other every day, sit next to each other in school and hold hands all day long. We thought that we were going to get married and have kids one day.
In the first grade, during the breaks between classes we would go behind the school and hold hands and kiss. Our school had this disgusting gray, blocky, Russian looking architecture so there were a lot of corners you could hide behind.
One day my best friend saw us and asked if he could watch and we said sure. He told another friend, who then told everyone in the school. It wasn’t long before people started lining up to watch us kiss. After the crowd grew past ten kids, we started telling people, “yeah you can watch us kiss, but you have to buy us a milk from the machine.”
Sabrina really liked this vanilla flavored milk that they sold for fifty cents.
I was really happy for Sabrina to have the milk that she liked but after a while, I wanted to have money too. I wanted to buy some weird bullshit like weapons, costumes, Spider Man figures, and Nintendo games. It’s crazy how sexist we were raised actually when it comes to what boys and girls should want.
My friend Alex became kind of like the bouncer and collected the money for us and in return, we gave him a cut. It grew to about twenty people, sometimes strangers, sometimes friends of ours. We were first graders but even fourth graders came because even to them, we were crazy.
We did this just about every day for a year. Then summer vacation came and I didn’t see her for two weeks. I cried every fucking day, it was really bad.
One day during the vacation, I was reading Bravo! Magazine, which is a really popular pre-teen magazine in Germany. There is a section about sex where Dr. Sommer would answer kids’ questions about sex and sexuality. I saw something about kissing with tongue so when Sabrina came back, we decided to try it.
French kissing made it possible for me to raise the price to two Marks. It’s weird but they were so shocked and impressed. People were either grossed out or really excited about it. Either way they would pay to see it. We made so much money during our time doing this. It’s kind of stupid looking back on it but I spent all of it on toys and costumes. I had all of the coolest toys though.
Everyone in the school knew what we were doing, including the teachers. We were twenty kids leaving school during the break then coming back all in a group with a bunch of people talking about the kissing. None of the teachers found out that we were actually taking money for it though. We only got into trouble because we went outside of school property.
Even that was only an issue because there was a man who allegedly tried to lure kids into his car a year before, so everyone was afraid of kids leaving school property. There were also a lot of junkies in the neighborhood.
We did this every day for years until we finally broke up. As much as I loved Sabrina with all my heart, I also fell in love with other girls all the time. But the way that I loved was very genuine. I was really madly in love with them, fascinated with them and thought about them every day. But after a while, I forgot about Sabrina and she forgot about me.
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