To Kisses Worth Remembering
This kiss might ruin everything. I don’t know it yet but I will turn the memory over in my hands to appreciate every press and breath and look for the moment I wobble ever so slightly on the cusp of caring too much. I don’t know yet, as his hands cup my face and his mouth creases against mine, that this stupid, incredible kiss — the kiss I got greedy for and took — is what might damn me in the long run. I don’t know yet that I will sit at my desk at work next week and feel warmth in my fingers because he leans into me just so, in spite of the guests outside the door and how late it’s getting and the drive I have to make alone back to my actual life, my normal life. This kiss will cast a neon glow across an otherwise unremarkable January and I savor it, already sensing at the edges how important it might be.
I’ve had a lot of kisses. Somewhere in the depths of my laptop there is a list of every person I have ever kissed, the stolen experiments at high school cast parties, the fragile firsts on Manhattan rooftops in which what I remember most is the view. I try to keep the best ones close, pinning them like butterfly wings to the pages of so many journals. What is a kiss if I can’t devote entire personal essays to understanding what it meant, what I want, where we’re going? What is a kiss if it doesn’t make me ask questions?
The precious ones live on in snow globes to be picked up and shaken on nights when I’m alone and Brooklyn is quiet. November 2013, my back against brick, the clouds racing across a winter sky at three in the morning. August 2007, his forehead bumping mine because I’m nervous and I didn’t tilt my head enough and he laughs, not unkindly. December 2015, a kiss half-dressed on a Sunday morning that neither of us knows will probably be the last one. They are the sensory patchwork quilt of growing up and learning how my skin tingles when I realize it’s not a matter of will we but when. Sometimes it’s not even about the kiss but about how my knee grazes his under the restaurant table, or how she touches the small of my back when we wait for the elevator doors to open. Anticipation is terrifying and yet very safe.
This isn’t a first kiss or even a last kiss. It’s just that his lower lip is so soft and wet and I let out a little shock of breath. I could have him for years and still want more. I don’t even remember our first kiss, only the long pause before the tension snapped and we lunged at each other across my bed — we’d been fooling ourselves with that whole “let’s just be friends” thing. There have been hundreds of kisses between us since then, on deserted off-season beaches and in poorly lit, thundering house parties, but something about this kiss is different and new. We are getting closer. It’s scary. The wallpaper in the bathroom is a floral pattern on a white background and he has spent his entire life in this house. My back fits into the corner between the shower and the wall and I lose my hand in his long hair. Why am I tracking down Tinder dates and SoHo flings when I already have this man who knows exactly how I want to be kissed and who knows exactly how I need to be loved: gently, and without demands.
This kiss is slow and insistent because I’m insisting. I want a kiss worth teasing out.
