I had a long-running period of sexual tension and mutual love with a cousin of mine. I lived in Brooklyn and she lived in Harlem but we would both pretty much stick together during the summers from when I was like 7 up until I was 14. She would take the train to see me and vice versa. We were like glued together all summer long and on practically every holiday. It was so obvious to our parents that they seemed a little uncomfortable with us being in the same room as one another. Being that young though, I always saw her as my closest friend. She was my first love. We came close to having sex when we were both 14 and we only stopped because her mother came home early.
Whatever we might have had, was cut short. She and her mom, my aunt, were both shot and killed outside of a corner bodega in a market space. Case of mistaken identity. Killers were never caught. Gang-related thing police assume. The Irish-Italian thing isn't only just a mobster thing and her being Irish and me being half Irish meant we both had had run ins with Italian kids. I spent the next 3-4 years drinking and smoking weed, arrested twice, and just trying to more or less kill myself without actually doing it myself. I can't count the amount of times I picked fights with people who most intelligent people knew to leave alone because I WANTED to die. It's funny that some of them were the evilest people alive and I count several of them as good friends now though most of them are dead or in prison now. Either way, at the time I just couldn't see a world where she didn't live in. I've never really moved on from her. The other women I've dated, as I've mentioned here before, were fucking yandere-esque train wrecks and so I think my soulmate is already dead and gone from me. Love and romance are extremely bittersweet topics for me and I rarely comment on someone else's love life because it only brings shit back.
I truly believe we would have been together. Probably not married but I know plenty of couples together for decades with kids and still aren't married. There are states that marry cousins though, I don't know if New York is one of them but it doesn't matter now. Also, the average person unrelated, has a 2% chance of conceiving children with deformities. With cousins, the average only rises to 4%. So it's barely any difference. It only gets troublesome with direct relations like brother, sister, mother, and father.
Anyway I'm not advocating to go screw your cousin. It's probably best you don't, but seeing as I've never had much experience with "family environments" I would have had no problem eloping and telling everyone else to fuck off. In fact I had fully intended to once we turned 18. We had talked about it and she was no more interested in the rest of our kin than I was. We were going to Buffalo. We had mutual friends there and I knew of a Kick-Boxing gym where I intended to work as an assistant trainer since the guy there was a local big shot and was always hiring new talent. So, it would have happened. Eventually. But alas it didn't.
So, talking about incest is a bittersweet subject to me. And anyone who wants to be a smartass and comment "Sweet Home Alabama" or any other shit like that, please, suck my dick beforehand.
