kisses are kisses and coffee is coffee

The kiss was like rose petals dappled with dew. Except it wasn’t. Because kisses aren’t like that. Kisses are like nothing you can describe with flowers. His kiss was dark-roasted coffee on a cold morning, a sensation that drives the bad dreams away and sets you up for a new day. Except kisses are kisses and coffee is coffee. His kiss was warm laundry fresh out of the dryer. The fleeting scent of a candle right when you blow it out. Sparklers on the Fourth of July. Frost on the windowsill.

And all of that is wrong.

Poets want the kiss to be immortalized. Dipped in bronze. Preserved in amber. Caught like a butterfly in a net, like a tiger in a cage.

But kisses are fleeting.

Have you ever kissed someone and every part of the kiss radiated to the tips of your fingers and the fringe of your eyelashes, all your nerve endings tingling with promise and desire? Maybe you’ve kissed a frog or two before, but no princes until now. And with this kiss, you understood what it would feel like to be able to kiss that person forever… and maybe in an alternate life you have or had or will. But in this life, you simply shared that one kiss.

Sometimes kisses are more than kisses. Sometimes kisses show you what you have to look forward to. What is in store for you. Sometimes a kiss is a key to unlock your whole life.

I met him on a Thursday. (Ha. I have no idea if it was Thursday. What’s a Thursday when you’re looking back nearly 40 years?) I met him on a day. On a small street in Paris. There was sun. He was with two of his friends at an outdoor cafe. I was tripping past, trailing behind my parents, wearing my bright yellow Walkman, faded Levi’s, and a thin tank top that said Italia across my chest. I was suntanned, and my long dark hair was all messy curls to the middle of my back. I was wearing huge silver hoop earrings, and my lips were finally in. How is it possible for lips to be in? High school girls had let me know that my big lips were too big and I should use some type of nude liner to make them look smaller. Models of that era had thin waists and thin thighs and thin lips. They had straight hair, and I’d tried to have straight hair.

But we were in Europe. And in Europe I had big hair and didn’t try to hide my too-big lips or my overly wide smile, and he and I met eyes like people do in movies. Except this was real life. My parents found a cafe that met their desires and went off to eat oysters, and I sat down at his tiny round table and learned he was the only one of the trio who spoke English aside from one of his buddies who knew the words “roller coaster” and “Bob Dylan.”

Chris was a shoe salesman at a high-end store, but he was playing hooky and enjoying the balmy June weather. He bought me a drink, and his knees brushed mine under the table, and I could feel the heat. Or the promise of heat. We made a plan to meet up that evening. My parents were off in their own world of traveler's cheques and trying to rent a Peugeot or a Renault, and I met Chris at a cafe in the 5th arrondissement and we went walking by the Seine. I was 18, and I was awake as if for the first time. Awake like fresh laundry out of the dryer and a candle… I mean, awake as if someone had turned on a switch inside me. High school was in my rearview. College was right ahead. And Chris was leaning down to brush the hair out of my eyes and tell me I was beautiful.

You know what? I was beautiful.

I can say that now, on a Tuesday. (What’s a Tuesday when you’re 56?) I can say that now because I didn’t know it then. I can say it without ego or artifice, with simply the clear eyes that can see through a past mist and describe the truth.

He led me into a rose garden surrounded by emerald-painted ironwork, and there was dew on the petals of all of the flowers or sprinkles from a summer rain, like in a song from the 70s. We slipped off to a secluded corner, found an area where there was nobody else around, and he tilted my head up towards his and he kissed me.

French kissed me.

Because he was French after all.

I’d read the novels in which the heroine’s heart always beats like a drum and her chest is heaving and the prose is purple, which is funny in a way since I’m a bluestocking.

I’d read of the way the women swooned and the men cleaved them to their chests and their pulses raced and the build up was so delicious that when the kiss finally happened, you, the reader, felt kissed, as well.

I’d read the poem "Jenny Kiss’d Me," in which the narrator recalls a kiss from long ago, and even though time is a thief, and health may have left him, he still remembers Jenny’s kiss.

But nothing prepared me for the way his hands felt on me or the way his eyes looked at me or the fact that we had only met a few hours earlier and now here I was like some trollop being kissed by a semi-stranger in a rose garden.

There are years when I don’t think about him. Days when I go about my business without noticing dew on a flower petal. When I don’t breathe in deep and catch a whiff of a scent from Paris decades ago.

But there are nights when I do think about him, and how our lips met and how sweet was the air around us. And his hands held me to him. And his body was hard and lean. And I gave myself up like an offering to Aphrodite and let a kiss unlock my world.