1. There was a bare mattress pushed down from the wall in a basement that smelled like mold. He was on the hockey team and was super sexy and also super sexist. We broke up shortly thereafter because he was cheating on me. It affected my view of sex more than I realized, and it took me until this year to realize it.
2. At the skating rink in middle school, I used to giggle with my friends about his beautiful blue eyes and wish he was skating with me. He was older than me. His blue eyes leading me up to an attic/heaven at a high school party years later, his gentleness and his desire to show me a new world so apparent to me, and I was in love with that feeling.
3. I was drowning for awhile as a teenager, and he saved me. We were never in love, but he left poems in my locker and played his songs for me at the bus stop.
4. He said come in my hands as he fingered me. I remember that before anything else. He was so tall and sensual and awkward. He’s schizophrenic now.
5. His friend took my virginity, and I took his. I was in love with his eyelashes. He seemed like a serious bro when he was with his friends, but then he was so adorable and genuine alone with me. Later, when we were both heartbroken in college, I would come to his apartment late, only very late, and we’d always cuddle ourselves to sleep afterward.
6. We smoked so much pot. He put on Phish. Tye-dye everywhere. His mom walked in and started screaming. We were naked (obviously). I didn't feel that embarrassed. He was also friends with my first, and I knew I was with this guy, number 6, and number 5, as a sort of revenge for what number 1 did to me. Still, I also liked them, and enjoyed their company.
7. I told him I was never going to fall in love with him. Eventually we dated for more than 3 years. It was true that I never really fell in love with him. He was emotionally abusive and brain-washy, but I still have fond memories with him. We were so young, I’m not sure he meant to be that way.
8. My second girl crush, but my first girl. That summer-after-high-school love. Here commenced my experiments with my sexuality (ongoing, forever).
9. There was someone next to us passed out on the pull-out couch at the warehouse party. This one was the quickest ever (also perhaps the least physically satisfying). I left immediately after we were done, though I think I was nice about it. He kissed me goodbye, but I didn’t really want him to.
10. The first one who was younger than me. I felt like a teacher even though I was only 1 year older than him, and it was fun feeling that way.
11. He did her first, remember? She was my best friend and he was our pot dealer next door. I remember, I made shadow shapes on the wall with my idle fingers while I waited.
12. And then later, I consider this different for some reason, because it was just him and I alone, number 11. We were tipsy and I felt older because college had started. Strangely memorable with passion and candles and soft music, setting me up for disappointment, mostly, as I entered my 20s, expecting one-night-stands to be so lovely.
13. In Rome, my first time in Europe. He was Egyptian. He was cute, but if I’m being honest with myself, I think I only did it because my best friend liked him, and she never even seemed to feel bad when she slept with my first a month after we broke up.
14. A girl at a party whose name I can’t remember. It was my 19th birthday and a guy from work and I had bought a bag of weed with our tip money from Quiznos. My bangs lit on fire as we smoked from my pipe in his car out to the country. She told me to kiss her while she was peeing in the toilet. Then we went out to her car.
15. I lied to him about how old I was. I went home with him after a really great party of lit majors. I told him that I wouldn’t sleep with him because then I would never want to see him again. I was so afraid to tell him I had lied about my age, it took taking acid on a regular Wednesday to work up the courage. He thought it was so cool that I just randomly took acid, until I told him I was only 19. He looked at me like he was in love with me from the moment he started looking at me, so he forgave me.
16. He was a lot older than me, though he was so sexy, and actually looked just a little older than me. Not that I cared. He was a doctor with a southern accent who loved to vape marijuana and had a great dog. Later on, he asked me to marry him even though we never dated. He thought I was a good candidate for an open marriage. Consider it seriously he said to me.
17. My first love. Don’t judge me that my first love is the 17th person on my list. Or judge me, I don’t care. I was so in love with him, and we were never really official, and while we were together, he would never tell me that he loved me. Mind fuck. I didn’t care. It was worth it to be with him and feel those things. We drove down the west coast highway from Lincoln City to San Luis Obispo. We moved to Buenos Aires together. We finished each others' thoughts. We were both writers in the same graduate program. I’d heard that breaking up was hard to do, but I never knew exactly how hard until him.
18. Ecstasy and electronic music. He was an accountant in Chicago. Rebound.
19. Her nose ring. Her text messages. Her attitude and her haircut and in the end she gave me her leather jacket because she said it looked better on me.
20. He was the one that reminded me that I would fall in love again, after long, dark months of wondering if my first love would be my only real love. In your 20’s this is a legitimate fear. I was terrified. He was only a one-night-stand at a wedding in Vancouver, Canada, a place I had only been before with number 17, but he opened my heart again. There is even a poem published about my experiences with this handsome stranger.
21. He was married. Then she caught us. Then she started dating a girl named Jessica too, and their two little boys would call me “daddy’s Jessica.” I thought I could marry him because of how much he loved me and took care of me. I needed that after number 17.
22. I met a guy at a Halloween party and brought him home. I can’t remember his name, his face, or anything else about the experience. Not even his costume.
23. He was 9 years younger than me, but maybe his soul was 50 years older than mine. It was a tiny town on the west coast of Mexico where I lived for six months. We were friends (and I was kind of with someone else), and when he started to fall in love, I told him to stop, so that we could stay friends forever. We’re still friends.
24. He was 10 years younger than me, and such a flirt. When we got to my villa on the mountain, he had this terrified look in his eyes, like he suddenly didn’t know what he was getting himself into. I laughed.
25. I thought I was falling for him and his vampire teeth. He was the someone else from number 23. When he broke up with his girlfriend, suddenly, we were together and I wasn’t sure how it had happened so quickly, how I had gotten myself into a situation where I was with two people at the same time in the tiniest town I’d ever lived in. There was so much passion. Gossip. Eventually there were tears.
26. He followed me with his eyes around until the beers and the tequila and the desire for interesting experiences led me home with him. He was older. I could have taken a taxi home instead of walking midday in the blazing heat in my night outfit the next day, but I felt like I deserved that walk of shame, so I did it. I’m not sure why I felt like that.
27. We had always been friends. We will always be friends. I always had a little tiny crush on him since I’d met him 10 year earlier. He told me he always wondered what it would be like to be with me. He was so charming and beautiful and also ridiculously sweet. I was staying with him in the middle of a road trip, and he brought me food home from his job the next night. I don’t think anything could ever ruin our friendship.
28. My second love. He didn’t speak English (which is why I speak Spanish as well as I do now, I think). He was gorgeous and 5 years younger than me, and told me how much he loved me and eventually he told me how much he wished he could be with a girl like me. I only came to understand that when I realized his soul couldn’t stand being with someone so free. He had some macho in him that I guess he may never be able to shake. Also, he’d had a girl back home, where he hadn’t lived for years, the whole time, which made me question everything about love. I was a wreck for awhile after that, and eventually stopped seeing him after we broke up, but before I left town lots of months later, we cuddled and talked for hours in his bed. Some connections are just strong and strange like that. The photo at the top of this post is from after we broke up, when I wrote that phrase on my mirror in lipstick and took a picture.
29. He looked like he needed someone a little crazy in his life, someone to show up in a jacket with nothing under it. Someone to leave in the morning before breakfast and break his ego a bit.
30. We met at a bar, and he told me he didn’t like Americans. He was sexy as hell, had a giant adorable dog, and ended up driving me back to where I was staying the next day, even though the traffic was the worst and it was so far away.
31. My third love, and the love of my life. He showed me how to access the energy source and heal myself. He showed me how to be detached and still in love at the same time. He looked like he was going to be famous when I met him, and now I know he will be. He is endlessly beautiful. We have had the most healthy relationship I’ve ever been in even before we were official, always being honest with each other, transparent, teaching each other everything we know. It took us a couple years and a lot of visits before we starting saying we were with each other. I had never moved anywhere for anyone, only for myself, but I was falling for him, so I said fuck it and moved to Barcelona, and waited and waited for him to be ready. SOOOOOO worth the wait. 
32. A teenage crush and friend of mine, he said to me, I wondered if there would ever be a moment where we were both unoccupied to give this a chance. It was soft, short lived, long-distance, not official at all. Just two people staring into each other’s eyes, cuddling a ton, and talking late into the night.
33. He was at a bachelor’s party in Cancun. A friend of mine was staying at the same hotel and said I had to come meet this giant group of gorgeous men. I did because I lived 45 minutes away. He was gorgeous, his soul too. He paid so much attention to me, not controlling, but not letting me leave his side. He danced with me, grabbed my face and kissed me, understood everything I needed without me having to say. When he left, he gave me his shirt, and I kept it for awhile, because the memory of him was so beautiful.
34. My first couchsurfer, and he didn’t sleep on the couch, well not on the first night anyway. He was lovely, but it wasn’t romantic. We went to cenotes and beaches and it was rare how we could talk so openly about everything.
35. I was trying to show my roommate that I wasn’t interested by bringing another guy home. The guy I brought home was actually pretty shitty to me when I told him he had to leave in the morning, as if he had never had a one-night-stand before, sending me lots of mean and even kind of threatening text messages.
36. Which led to my roommate and I sleeping together. We were bonding because he told off the mean Colombian one-night-stand guy who wouldn’t leave me alone. We told each other we’d go out and be each other’s wingmen, but then we started making out after a drink or two, and went home, to our house where we both lived, together. He knew I was in love with someone in Barcelona and planning to move there, and I told him under no circumstances would it last between him and I, but it could be fun anyway. It got intense pretty quickly as he fell in love with me. The thing is, I loved him too, though it was a known temporary kind of love to me. There should be another word for the love I’m talking about here, but English doesn’t have it. In the end, he kicked my dog, threw glass at me, ripped off my clothes, begged and begged and begged me to stay intermittently with telling me I am a thoughtless whore, slashing my tires three times causing me to postpone leaving, also asking me to marry him, renting a house for me to live in with him even after I had driven away, still going back and forth between begging and insults for months until I finally had the strength to block him. It was the most dangerous romance of my life.
37. I woke up one morning after a fight with number 36 naked in the bed of a girl named Jessica. Another girl was there too. It’s hard for me to recall the events exactly, though her bed smelled so good, and she made me pancakes in the morning before driving me home. I later discovered a photo on my phone where I look so vacant inside, and I’m not sure who took it. It’s her and me and the other girl. I’m in the middle and they are clearly praying on my vacant self. I still wonder who took that photo.
38. He was 11 years younger than me, sexy but also kind of dorky. He was so interested in being my boyfriend, even though I told him I was in love with someone else. He couldn’t understand that love and sex are different things, and sometimes, when you’re in love with someone, you’re not with them, because it isn’t the right time. He kept telling me not to go, but in a sweet, 19-year-old way.
39. He was (also) 10 years younger than me, and told me he couldn’t believe a girl like me could possibly be into a guy like him. He also knew I was in love with someone else, that this fling was temporary. He didn’t care. He said I was the coolest person he’d ever met, and he hoped that he would “grow up” to be like me. He looked at me with the most adoring eyes. This was right before I moved to Barcelona.
40. In Barcelona,
*actual number unknown
from This Is Between Us by Kevin Sampsell
