So I made a mistake. No, I didn’t lose my virginity. Not even close. But I learned that there are different types of virginity. Virginity, naïveté, innocence; however you want to put it, I’ve lost a piece of it. I think from the time you are born you are given a huge puzzle that’s already completed and that puzzle is your innocence. You live by it, but eventually pieces start to fall away. Or are they taken? For some sick, perverted reason I’ve removed some of those pieces myself. I noticed that when I did, it left that open piece very sensitive. I joke, kid, and laugh to get around the uneasiness of the situations that the missing piece has now allowed me to enter. I remember finding a mussel shell once and prying it open with a stick so as to see the insides. I didn’t know any better; I couldn’t have been more than ten at the time. But I remember breaking a piece of the shell accidentally. It left the mussel unprotected. Sometimes I think I mutilate my own shell on accident. I just want to know how it feels to be like other people. I want to know how it feels to not have the shell, so I break it off, piece by piece. The puzzle starts to look incomplete. I’m not how I was meant to be. I’m unprotected.

I come from what today’s society would label a “Christian” home, though my parents both drink wine and, on occasion, I cuss in response to things not going my way. My parents have always been strict with me when it comes to dating. I don’t know if they really have had to be that way because I have never really had anyone interested in me anyway. It does quite a number for your self esteem, let me tell you. I’m sixteen years old and four months ago I had never had anyone who had fallen head over heels for me, though you can be sure that there had been many instances where I’ve thought I was head over heels for a guy. It hasn’t ever been a mutual thing. My little sister seems to have the entire male species eating out of the palm of her little thirteen-year-old hand. My parents are another shell I have, except I cannot peel that one away through self-mutilation. I cannot make them go away. There have been many times that I have realized just how lucky I am to have them as a shell. They protect me from things that I would have unknowingly done that would have scarred me far less than the lectures I’ve had to sit through. When I met someone finally who seemed way more into me than I was into him, it seemed that I was finally catching up to my peers in the relationship field.

Wrong.

I wasn’t catching up. I was making mistakes that I should never have made. I was wearing my heart on my sleeve like some infatuated lunatic. I was “in love” with a guy. Why? Because he was very positive that he was in love with me. It was harmless at first: chatting on Facebook, texting each other (constantly), and calling back and forth to talk for hours about things that didn’t even matter. I revealed things to him that I shouldn’t have, and in turn he did the same to me. We didn’t even live in the same state. How could it be dangerous? He came to visit and I realized that I didn’t even like him. I liked the attention. I liked the way it felt to be wanted by someone. I liked the things he said to me.

I didn’t like him.

I was selfish. I was stupid. I was scared. I didn’t know what I was doing. I can’t help that I was fickle.

Because I had never dated, never even gotten asked, etcetera etcetera, I had certainly never gotten kissed before. I pulled up that puzzle piece faster than I could have even taken to think it over. I needed that one gone. Everyone else had it gone. Everyone else had their first kiss in junior high. I’m sixteen for crying out loud! A junior in high school! So I gave up my lip’s virginity because I wanted to know what it felt like. I remember pulling away from him and thinking to myself, ‘Do I really even like this guy?’

Answer?

Not at all. I wasn’t physically attracted to him in the least bit. It’s easy to fake it over the Internet, but when I had to come face to face with him, things got a little tougher. I regret every tear that I shed for that guy. I regret the countless hours I spent thinking about him and the money I’m now spending paying my parents for the phone bills that I racked up while in that “relationship” with him. It was a shallow one at best.

Yes, I lost another puzzle piece, or rather; I pulled it out and threw it away before I had time to think twice about that decision. I know girls who don’t feel wanted, just like I did. They have given up their real virginity for guys who only want them for the sex. I’m not desperate for love. I don’t have that problem anymore. That’s one piece I don’t want to have to regret losing.