I’m not sure what I’ll end up regretting when I’m on my death bed, but kissing Jeff Bennett in Grade 6 will likely rank in the top 10.
It’s not that he was such a bad guy (as far as Grade 6 guys go) but he did have one tiny flaw.
He had a cold sore.
Alas, caught up in the peer pressure of a middle-school game that called for boy-girl pairs to disappear around a corner and hook up for 10 seconds of closed-mouth “ziplock” kissing, I went for it.
My life has since been a cautionary tale for all who engage in such sexy risk-taking behaviours. From the moment I emerged (not totally satisfied) from behind that school, orofacial herpes has been my lifelong companion. Lying dormant in my facial nerves, the virus waits only for weakness, stress and sunlight to bloom and instantly vapourize all forms of intimacy for at least a week. I feel the lip-tingle that signals another “episode” like a medieval Genoan might have felt the buboes under his arm signaling the Black Death.
The outcome is just as inevitable: the soreness, the blistery-ness, the scabbiness-all immortalized in my next yearbook picture or family Christmas photo.
I don’t expect pity from those who steered clear of the virus in their wild middle-school years; I just don’t want Grade 6ers today to make the same mistake I did. Give in to peer pressure, kids, and one day you too might find yourself lurking with scabby lips near a group of people who were once your friends sharing an ice-cream bar.
You too could one day feel the transformation coming on like a werewolf squinting at a full moon rising and wake up a week later, dazed and starved for human contact.
And don’t think just because we’ve sent a man to the moon and invented smart phones that someone out there has come up with a cure or even a decent way to cover up your lesions.
Now, I know a lot of people get cold sores (almost 58 per cent if a U.S. study cited on Wikipedia can be trusted) so maybe catching the virus sometime in my life was inevitable anyway.
But I just can’t shake the feeling that things would have been a lot better if I hadn’t succumbed to peer pressure and kissing curiosity in my middle-school days.
So I say choose abstinence, kids, because even one conversation spent watching someone else’s eyes watching your throbbing, blistery lip while you talk is too many.
And no one should have to end up hunched bitterly over a keyboard in her later years, looking back on all the New Year’s Eve countdowns that could have ended so differently if she hadn’t kissed Jeff Bennett in Grade 6.
Cornelia Naylor is a Burnaby NOW reporter. This column originally appeared in the Chilliwack Times.
