(8) Kissing
I’ve wanted to write about kissing for a long time. It’s the ocean of physical contact; the fancy pearls your grandmother wore, the way that new gal moves her hand when she’s explaining something; it’s apples and wine and rain and sunset, gentle breeze and suffocating tsunami. I guess I shied away because…well, everyone kisses. Haha, ‘everyone’. And maybe what I think of kissing is obvious and boring. But, it’s there, always, this paragraph of images draped across my heart, and so, off I go.
My first romantic one was in a football field. I had braces. It was raining. He tilted my face to his and was smirky smiley because he knew it was my first. Time spun around us in wet, noisy, stumbles, and as his lips touched mine, I could smell the grass beneath us. I heard the rain spill carelessly, and he laughed as he pulled away to tell me to close my eyes. I couldn’t feel my fingers buried in his coat, but the mud soaked through my shoes and between my toes.
It was awkward and close and meandered across my life and back before it ended. I felt chosen and regarded and judged, in one breath and half a moment. Rain and night splashed everywhere, interrupted only by city lights and my hair across my face.
The implied romanticism in kissing has always haunted me. What are we romanticizing? If it’s a kiss on the cheek, or the forehead, or the hand, what intimacy so readily merges with sex? I kiss my dogs on the heads all the time. I’ve kissed friends on the cheeks and, while holding a loved one’s grief in my overpacked eyes, wondered why physical contact is so sexualized. Are we that horny? That lonely? What is it about intimacy that means we must eventually want every physically intimate act? And, if there is some sort of magnetic pull with physical intimacy, how bad is it if we want every physically intimate act? Why is that pull laced with so much taboo?
Pack animals are vastly casual in their proximity. They sleep on each other, wrestle with each other, clean each other, kiss each other, hump each other, and all with reckless abandon. I get the differences; we’ve evolved differently than other animals and I understand that casual humping is probably not a great idea (or is it??? I’ve had wines). I do get that. But I wonder if we have gotten too wrapped up in the intricacies of sex and vulnerability, and if it has tainted our ability to achieve intimacy.
What if intimacy was less elusive? What if growing closer to people involved less taboo, what if trust was less frequently broken because we, on either end of it, weren’t so scared?
My husband has always trusted me, even when we first started dating and I was at a giant glaring zero security-wise. I fought his perception of me for years. And he still trusted me. (I don’t even know.) I told him all of my feelings, for other people, for ideas, for music, for our future. We talked about cheating, and being in love versus love for a friend, and all the crossovers that tiptoe between. And he never blinked at my exuberant heart; even though his is calm and deliberate and focused. I think his unhesitating acceptance has changed how I view physical intimacy. I’ve never held to the idea that you should reserve it for a select someone, or for just one person, or whatever. Bleh. Who doesn’t believe that physical intimacy is indicative of a different type of attraction? Where does it say that that type of attraction must follow strict rules? It’s not algebra. Where does it say that reserving it will make your chemistry with one person stronger? Being horny is not chemistry. PSA. If we get to do whatever we want, with whoever we want, and are only accountable to each other, what is complicated? The relationship, or our need for others not involved to accept it? My husband’s acceptance of me, and my over eager heart, has allowed me to appreciate so much more about what we do to be close. I get to see my needs and his without worrying about stigma. It has let me cradle our most fluid gestures closer than I would have if left to my own devices.
Kissing is maybe my favorite gesture. I love its flexible nature, its eagerness and shyness in the same breath, or over many! — I love that we, as humans, can do it whatever way we choose and have it mean every drop of our purest heart or just the faintest breeze of ready affection. I love our reasons for giving them, and our reasons for waiting. Kissing earns its keep in the arsenal of humanity, with such thoroughness that I try to be a better human in order to do it justice.