The first time I jacked off was an accident. I was a dork ass kid pummeled by an onset of pubescent hormones. So I sat on the edge of my bed with a wooden ruler pressed to my dick. I wanted to know how big it was.

I’d never came as I wasn’t aware that was an option. Kids in class made jack-off jokes by imitating the act with their hand but I didn’t know what that meant. Still, I needed to see how big I was. I used my hand to make it overtake more notches of the ruler. Transport blood from top to bottom. Push stick to skin to add more inches. It felt good. Really good. Then my penis discharged across my body. A hot shot of sprouting seed.

I freaked out. Thought I was sick. That something bad just happened. I wiped and flushed my secret. I didn’t know what this was but it wasn’t long before I tried again. Soon fear washed away. In its stead came a five times a day habit.

I grew up in the country. Gravel roads, woods, and a mud-fucked river. Our farm was fun but also isolating. No girls lived near. I had few chances to see them outside class or Sunday school. Instead I played with male cousins that lived close by.

With them I’d bike five miles to the nearest town of 300. There we’d knock doors to see which friends were home. With them we’d play outdoors or ride to the gas station for junk food. If we bumped into girls it was exciting but made me nervous. Even if they’d been a classmate since kindergarten I felt an unease not present with males. In class I could be funny or blend into the group. In the wild it was different. No longer in the neutral zone.

We were a class of thirty. The girls were my friends insomuch as friendship across sex lines existed. But boys played with boys. Girls with girls. School dances and one-on-one convos made me anxious. Still, I pulled through in fair order. Deflected with jokes and stowing away. But my sexual awakening added another dimension.

I always liked girls but now attached to that sat a bubbling pubescence. I had no guidance in this regard. Didn’t know how to tamp it down nor fit this new thing into my being. As exciting as it was to fantasize and fuck myself these feelings filled me with confusion and fear. I could blow loads alone but didn’t know how to move past that.

I held an oceanic crush on a classmate. She also lived in the country, just a few miles away. In retrospect I could’ve walked to her house in an hour. Biked in a fraction of that. Moonlight meetings made easy. A trot down farm roads planted thick with soybeans and sugar beets. But I had no idea how to take action. Held no adult perspective saying we could have something if she’d have me. A stumbling, first time romance. Sharing pop and awkward kisses.

Had she proposed it I would’ve shot to the moon. Cum my pants a hundred times. Had I said it to her perhaps the same. But I was shy. Scared and anxious. All I could do was stick pencils in her hair in Civics class.

That’s the cruelty of puberty. It floods your body with desires before you know how to sate them. How to transition from jacking it alone to sharing yourself with another. So instead of with her I’d save my pubescent loads for the free ads sent in Sunday papers.

Sunday was sin day. Church and religious ed then home to the waiting paper stuffed thick with women. Glossy ads of models in various states of undress. I had no visual outlet beyond these JCPenney weeklies. There was of course my imagination but for the first time in life I found it lacking. Found my brain to be incapable of conjuring enough of the female form.

We only had a few channels and no computer. No access to porn or pictures of women that weren’t related to me or fifty years my senior. So I waited each week for the new ads, new faces to inspire onanistic abuse.

I loved looking through them. At the beautiful brunettes donning bras and panties. If I was lucky both were displayed in a single shot. I’d sneak ads to my room and get lost in elation. Shoot loads to every visage. Then I’d step to the woods and burn these cum covered pages. Dead babies disappeared to smoke.

During this era of discovery some friends stayed the night for my birthday. It comes in spring, a passing of the torch time of year. Sodden leaves show their face as snow slinks away. Trees sprout cover for the coming season. The river melts and cracks apart, forming huge ice floes that thunder as they dissipate or smack into trees. For my party we decided to burn a fire. So we decamped to the trees.

I brought the glossies thinking my friends would like them. Illicit pictures that taught the female form. But they didn’t seem to notice. So I burnt the beautiful pages. They lit the wood that warmed us. As the fire crackled I felt disappointed my friends didn’t take to the photos as I had. But we all came to sex in our own way. It’s a personal journey with quirks but also commonalities. I’m sure they had their own secret stashes. Later I learned porn had already seeped into their lives. Soon it’d enter mine.

Porn acted as a portent to the future. Bra laden pages its progenitor. Earth’s order states thought then action. For me that felt best. Learning my body was the necessary precursor to sex, an act that felt foreign and far away. I needed that slow rolling evolution, the endless hours in my bedroom alone.

Back then I wouldn’t have known what to do with a girl even if one would have me. Better to first fumble through ads and imagination. I needed these years to overcome anxiety and awkwardness. To feel even semi-comfortable in my own skin.

Still, my body screamed for the touch of another. In its stead I settled for my own. For the women that arrived each week in the paper. The ones who helped me take my first steps into sex. They came slow and unsteady. I’d walk a long path before going further.