Kissing 

We sat on the stairs and looked up at each other for a while. Hands sweating, face covered in dirt and grime, hoping that our lips would touch. I was nervous and tired. Well, extremely tired. My legs felt like jello and it hurt to lift them under by bodies weight. The run was long and grueling. Summer brought a heat that cooked our skin and fried our brains that it was almost impossible to finish. The half marathon was over an hour ago and we were on our way back to my friend’s house to change and get ready for our Saturday. Well at least I had hoped.

Little did I know about kissing at that point. I thought you could just smash your lips together, making a “mhwua” sound. It was odd. When I thought about it at the time maybe I should have looked up some sort of kissing tongue exercise on Youtube. No. Don’t do that. That’s werid. Kissing takes practice and — experience? The experienced people know what they are doing. They know everything. Your mouth is their fruity gushers. It bursts with flavors. Mouth flavors. There are probably countless mouth flavors. One’s that are slightly sweet, bitter, salty, or something else. Or perhaps grey. People who kiss to much to don’t know what kissing tastes like anymore. Their flavors become boring. Like a potato salad or a plain hamburger. No cheese please! Like a high school lunch lady that doesn’t care about your child’s sustenance and is just trying to make a paycheck to feed her own family. But what experienced people don’t do is take their time. Time is important. Otherwise they take your time. And your time is flying by at a million miles an hour. Twenty minutes turns into an hour and then three hours.

I didn’t really know what I was doing in that moment. Or any moment. There are times when it’s best to slow down. Slow down to a crawl. Notice their neck. Or that stray hair sticking out of their eyebrow wanting to bend the opposite way from all the other hairs. You go eyebrow hair! Yes. Slow things down to a crawl. Notice them. Because those are the last things you think about when you’re nervous. And when you’re nervous there’s little signals that go off in your brain. Little fuzzy signals that tell you to stop thinking rationally or irrationally. Little yellow guys that run around pulling levers and knobs indicating some sort of order. When the right order is reached they release fuzzy little moth balls that cloud your thoughts. My brain quickly filled with those fuzzy moth balls and little yellow guys. It was chaos. But it was controlled. Passion turned to chaos—over time. But I’m ok with chaos. Order gets boring. Order is not needed. Not all the time.