My First Time Being Chased By Girls

It's quite amusing to me that when I looked back on my childhood in desperation to find a good topic for the deceptively arduous "your first time" essay, a group of five girls crawling towards me on all fours while smiling devilishly was the first image that came to mind.

In my kindergarten, there were no nerds, jocks, or popular groups; there were "boys" and "girls." While we boys did not segregate ourselves from the girls, I do remember that one of my "boy" friends threatened to "fire me" (my kindergarten's jargon for no longer hanging out with someone) when I invited one of my "girl" friends to my fifth birthday party. We had our pride as boys and they had their pride as girls, but there was one interaction that sticks out to me, the joint idea that the girls wanted to kiss us and had cooties and that we boys should avoid their kisses at all costs.

I remember one day in particularly sunny day around the back of the school house. There I was with three of the boys in the group, watching the girls crawl towards us out of the shed they were playing in. My friends started to turn white, break ranks, and before we knew it we were sprinting around the play area running from the girls trying to kiss us. At its heart it was all good fun. A large part of the appeal for the girls was a game which gave them an unspoken power over the boys and we guys enjoyed outrunning and eluding our enemies. I was chased by one girl who I knew was proactive in the girls group and didn’t casually associate with me much; she was just chasing me to be part of the game. So I wonder what would have happened if I just stopped running, stopped play the unspoken game, what they would do to me. Also, if it was just a game of tag at heart, why did we all go along with it if there were not so enticing steaks to go along with it for both groups?

A part of me really wanted to be caught by the girls. Sure it was fun to avoid the girls and one of the unspoken rules of the game was that you don’t want to get caught but the consequences of getting caught were a mystery and the threat of being captured and kissed up was one of the more tempting ways to go down. To me there was something very fantastical about the idea of being taken against my will by a horde of girls and letting them do what they wanted to me. It was kind of like the castle anthrax from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a trap you don’t want to get rescued from.

This is one of my more amusing and indeed embarrassing recollections from my young childhood. Looking back to it as an adult I find it hilarious how advanced I was for a five year old kindergartener. I wonder if the other boys and girls felt the same.