[Warning: This post (which is about my life) has some elements of a "coming of age" story. If you're easily offended by the reality that people who are under the age of 18 have sensual thoughts, then you might not want to read on. If you're uncomfortable with the reality that I have sensual thoughts, then I don't blame you. If you're just generally uncomfortable with sensual thoughts, then let me know, and I'll get you in contact with a good psychologist.]

When I was a wee lad of fourteen tender years, I was invited to spend an afternoon with my friends Aika, Jason, and Emily, swimming at a recreational facility in our 'hood called the "Jewish Community Center."

It was meant to be a strange sort of couple's experience. In adult terms, it could probably be called "double dating," but I like to think that it was really just a small party with guests who happened to arrive in an equal gender ratio.

Jason and Emily were in the middle of a torrid love affair that would have made even the staunchest child psychologist blush, while Aika and I were merely friends who were used to being thrown into situations with mildly suggestive overtones.

In spite of our differences, we all got along well.

Once inside the rec center, the males of the group ran off to their locker room while the females ran off to the other. Some things happened, a few minutes passed, and we all emerged dressed in our various respective swimming equipment.

I don't remember what anybody was wearing except Aika. She was scantily clad (and quite attractively so) in a small hot-pink bikini.

I've always wondered where the color "hot-pink" comes from. I imagine that there's a factory in some third-world country where flamingos go in one end, and their skinless carcasses are shot out the other where they pile up and fester for months until a truck comes, picks them up, drives them to a shipping facility, has them crated, and sends them off to America where they will be sold to Taco Bell as the meat known only as "other."

Many flamingos died to make Aika's swimsuit possible, but that's all right. It's not like they're on the endangered species list or anything.

After admiring her body for the several milliseconds required to fire off the vascular chain reaction that causes an unrelenting and painful erection in the shorts of a hormone-stricken youth, I jumped in the water.

There, I splashed.

And Aika splashed.

And Jason and Emily used their tongues to check each other's tonsils for the sore-throat causing bacteria called streptococcus. If any of this bacteria existed in either throat, then it would have immediately crossed into the other person's mouth by walking across the tongue, much in the same way settlers arrived in the Americas so many ages ago by crossing the Bering Land Bridge.

The bacteria would have transferred itself from one person to the other like restless rodents passing between cages through hamster tubes.

Meanwhile, Aika and I continued to splash.

As splashing began to lose its novelty, Aika and I looked for other things to do. By this point, Jason and Emily had joined into one symbiotic unit; an experiment in high volume saliva transfer rates between two human beings, testing both the physical limits of the universe and the limits of my patience.

I eventually found myself sitting on a Styrofoam novelty flotation device, while Aika went to put the diving board through its paces.

I could hear her taking the occasional dive behind me. In front of me, Jason and Emily had nearly succeeded in swallowing each other. To avoid watching, I began to focus on the clock on the far wall.

Its hands were oversized - a constant reminder that the joy of the swimming pool was temporally limited, and I watched as those ruthless hands continued their relentless march, ceaselessly tick-tick-ticking towards adult swim. There was nothing worse than adult swim - It marked the child's eviction from paradise and the violent birthing process of reintegrating with the real world. When adult swim arrived, it caused the same hollowness in the pit of my stomach that I felt when Saturday morning cartoons gave way to late morning golf programs. It was horrifying.

I was broken from my private lamentation when Jason and Emily, for the first time in hours (days?), managed to remove their lips from each other's faces and do something other than trigger each other's gag reflexes.

They gasped. They pointed.

I turned around, but it was much, much too late.

Aika was standing at the side of the pool, bent over and covering her upper body with her arms, obviously embarrassed as her eyes darted around the room, looking like a frightened animal trying frantically to plot its escape.

I watched, puzzled, as Aika ran into the women's locker room. It was then that I learned from an excited Jason and Emily that Aika's left breast had popped out of her swimsuit. It was over, I was told, in the blink of an eye.

"Over?" I thought to myself. "...really? Over?!"

I mustered up every last bit of psychic energy that I possibly could, attempting, with my mind, to turn the great wheels and gears of time back down the way they had come, reversing the continual forward momentum of change and causing it, just for a moment, to run in reverse so that I could personally witness the momentous occasion that had slipped past me so recently.

After straining my mental powers for a minute, I learned the hard way that one of two things was possible:

1) I was psychic, but the wheels and gears of time were obviously encased in an ESP-proof shield

-- or --

2) I was psychic, but my powers were not strong enough to alter the course of the entire Universe

I felt like someone who had missed the second coming of Jesus in his living room because he was too busy looking out the window and contemplating his mailbox, with its rusty little flag, to have noticed the apparition of the son of God just behind him.

There are ashen shadows in various poses scattered around the town of Pompeii just south of Mount Vesuvius where, in 79 AD, some people saw that the volcano was erupting, and some people just didn't.

And, in the swimming pool of a small community swim center in Portland, Oregon, around summertime in 1992, there was a boy who missed out on seeing a breast because he was watching a clock while worrying about the imminent arrival of adults who would be using the pool to swim laps and shed pounds.

It might seem like I'm blowing this a little out of proportion. A fourteen year old girl really doesn't have much in the way of breasts, so it's not like I missed much. If an adult breast is something akin to a carton of milk, then Aika's breast at the time would have been like one of those little containers of cream that you get with your coffee. Basically just some loose skin with a nipple attached to it.

But that doesn't matter. It was skin, forbidden skin, and I missed it.

I missed it, and there was no socially appropriate way to get that moment back.

Moving twelve years forward in time to last weekend, I found myself in Aika's living room, looking over her shoulder at a series of modeling pictures that had recently been taken of her.

The photos were fabulous. Her body is absolutely gorgeous - beyond my abilities as a writer to describe, actually. There just aren't any proper words for what I saw.

But, it wasn't all roses.

Every few photos, Aika's outfit changed and became progressively more risqué, each outfit lulling me further into the belief that the photo shoot could have only ended one way. The last set of images had her in a very revealing outfit, leaving me with a growing anticipation, welling up from my gollywots like a geyser getting ready to blow, when suddenly...

...it was over.

"Over?" I thought to myself. "...really? Over?!"

Risqué though the images had been, not one of them featured a breast. Not one!

It was like Mission Control had stopped the launching of a space shuttle at T minus 1. It just wasn't fair.

Sometimes, spending time with Aika is like spending time in a movie that's been edited for television. It's full of a certain kind of unfulfilled anticipation that is guaranteed to leave you mentally scarred even a decade after the fact.

But it's worth it.