Guest Blog: Everyone I've Ever F*cked.
#1: Byron - The Ancient Moonlight Kiss

Can you imagine? Clytemnestra and Byron? Could there be any more of a romantically christened union than two children tasting their first experience of physical lust than Clytemnestra and Byron? Even the most graceless virgin must in some way acknowledge the lure of the melodramatic, to take a first lover that is, truly, Byronic.
Ah well. I guess names can mask a world of horror. I found Alexandria soulless and impersonal, whereas Catford, say, is a place of unparalleled excitement and adventure.
No, really.

So, Byron. Slight, dark, slim with fine features, olive skin, soft lips, kind eyes, sensitive hands. A musician; first in a long line of such. We met in a gaudy nightclub, both watching and deploring others possessing less self awareness than we. We agreed to go for a long walk in an icy April dawn, before the moon fell, and before the sun came up. Wandering, talking exhaustively, the question of a kiss arose. I had only ever kissed Briony in primary school, Brian at a sixth form party. I demurred, pointing out that he might not possess the oral skills required. He instantly offered to practise - and we stood side by side, french kissing the cold dark window of a deserted bakery in the small hours, before comparing the patterns left by lips, tongue and breath. Thus I was satisfied he was qualified, for the first kiss I ever cared about.
I was that age of gawky teenage where you feel a pained kinship with the elephant man and nothing is more certain that the fact that nobody could ever love you.
We walked to the oldest part of town - a ruined country estate, and wandered through the huge oak, ash and sycamore trees that edged the hill, looking out over the pitch, twinkling horizon, and the looming Downs beyond. Walking further, we decided that in the days before the estate's ruin, this corner must have been an orchard. Blundering through a hedge into one of the gardens lining the old estate's perimeter, we found a set of children's swings, and rocked, talking in the moonlight , for another four hours.
Yes, we did attempt sex, but two virgins plus a cold snap are not exactly conducive to a grand amour, and the logistics and geometry of the thing defeated us. I felt it as a personal affront at the time, a humiliation of the highest order, a failure on my part at the whole enterprise of love and sex (Although really, a fearful, still sixteen part of me was rather relieved). It was years later that I'd become experienced enough to notice that the delectable Byron - with the soft eyes, the moist red mouth, with the sweet warm saliva - and a lack of knowledge of female geography that was stupendously absolute - Byron was himself clearly unschooled and inexperienced. Its the nature of early-mid teens to assume that everyone but oneself is born 'knowing' these things, after all.
I didn't lose my virginity that night (that honour was reserved for a seedier, older, more conventional locale, a year on), but I did lose my heart, my soul, my innocence. The glorious summer of longing and wanting, and waiting that followed, I often walked through the same orchard, knowing and reliving that moment again - crisp air, frozen grasses, dark wet leaves, frosted vapours of breath, thick coats and warm bodies beneath, icy, silvered moonlight and above all a feeling of something ancient, something almost tribal occurring - that was the moment I'd remember. The moment my adult world began.

[* In honour of how it sounds I've given a pale shadow of this nom de plume to all the other assignations and liaisons in this series]

Posted by Clytemnestra, as part of the Twelve Guest Blogs of Christmas