Last Kisses

I have to confess to not exactly remembering our first kiss. Not in that schmaltzy, saccharine Hollywood format we’re all brainwashed into wanting. There wasn’t a band playing a song that would become our song. There was no razzmatazz. Very little drama to speak of. We were two ordinary people sharing a bit of a moment. After all, a kiss is a kiss. A mere meeting of lips.

We may have been ordinary people, but we were made special in the quality of that moment. Not that we were ever exactly ordinary. Not really. We were different. Sometimes difficult. Our roundness did not fit the squareness of life. We were drawn together in our mutual inability to understand quite how to fit in without becoming exhausted at the effort of it all. 

My tendency towards ineptitude added a certain something to the prelude to our first kiss. Too busy enjoying her company, I didn’t dare ruin it by considering it a date. Too timid. Too afraid to ruin something with potential beauty by rushing in and stomping all over the budding flowers with my size nine boots.

She told me she was a little awkward that we were on a date. This revelatory nugget got caught in the tyre tread of life then flung right between my eyes. Lobotomised by my own idiocy, I grinned in the bathroom mirror. The boy done good. He wasn’t sure how he’d done good, but here he was doing good. He was in it and he may well win it. Just as long as he didn’t stuff things up.

Now, the normal run of play would be that my fear would unfurl and do its thing. Wouldn’t take much. Fear is a lazy creature. With a flick of its finger, it can cause just the right amount of doubt-ridden chaos. We do the rest. I certainly do. I have been guilty of readily and diligently doing fear’s work for it. After all, the devil makes work for idle hands.

So, maybe I don’t remember that first kiss in its full, cinematic glory, because I was too busy battling my fear and trying not to ruin things. She helped. I just could not subject her to such nonsense. And so I focused on her and listened to her and enjoyed every word and movement. 

You see, I do remember being heightened. Possessed of senses that I was not aware could be turned up to eleven on the dial. I watched her mouth form the words in stop motion. Every expression was a delight. The formation of each expression and the effect it had on her eyes. She was celestial. I stared upon her in awe and felt humbled in her presence. 

Thankfully something of her spoke to my hidden depths, and I rose to meet her as an equal. This was some of what I remembered. The meaning of it was what was important. We’d both found something special in this world of ours and that was what counted. My life was changing and it would never be the same again, whatever the outcome of this evening.

And then we were snogging. The first kiss swallowed up by wave after wave of kisses. This was no singular moment. It was elemental and I lost myself in her. I remember feeling dizzied by her. Tasting her, feeling her, the complicated scent of her making itself known to me. Her perfume. Her hair conditioner. Her skin. Her breath. I took a little of her in and awoke to a hunger that left me starving when we parted.

I regressed into the bliss of a young lover. I embraced the madness of young love. I wanted to see her again and again and again until she was all I ever saw. I closed my eyes and she was emblazoned upon my inner eyelids. She haunted me and then she possessed me.

We possessed each other and our roots intertwined. We no longer made sense when we were apart. We became a part of a whole and my celebration of our present and the beacon of a future of fulfilled dreams left our past in the shade. Every kiss counted, and so the first kiss was filed away in the attic of my mind, gathering dust and facing the prospect of never being seen again.

Getting on with the business of living was all the better for her being by my side. Each day was a blessing. We awoke to each other and provided the best of distractions. There was no need to face the day. We faced each other instead. She was my reason for being, and every night I was rewarded with her presence yet again. We moved easily around each other and we moved intuitively with each other. Never did we need to learn any of the dance steps. We heard our music and moved to the same rhythm.

This was it. 

She was it.

She completed me and made me want to be a better man. I became her rock and safe harbour and she gave me the reason to grow. She was my sun and I reached out to her with every fibre of my being.

This was the love I didn’t even know I was searching for. If I’d even glimpsed this love before I met her, I would have run and hidden in the darkness. This was a terrifying love. The real deal. A burning light that challenged me to be all that I possibly could be. A love that demanded that I proved my worth throughout the rest of my life.

And I did.

I did not see the end coming. I did not know that ends such as these were in the world. I will never know how they are made, let alone the why of them. In my ignorance, I did not think there could be anything that could be the equal to our love, let alone an opposing force that amounted to a demented wrecking ball intent on our annihilation. 

In the end, life happened. And in our case, life sent a juggernaut of tragedy our way. An avalanche of incomprehensible trauma fell upon us and crushed us into an isolation of madness. 

The incredible beauty of our coming together had caught the attention of jealous gods and they had plotted and connived an envious revenge that was a long time in the coming. As the gods enacted their plans, their hate filled envy festered and dribbled its poison into our lives, so by the time we realised we had been infected, the cancer had spread too far. The diagnosis was terminal. 

Even as we tried to climb out of the rubble of the trauma, we knew that nothing would ever be the same again. The beauty we had shared was drowning in the depths and neither of us had the wherewithal to save it. We’d forgotten how to swim. Our minds and bodies were no longer our own.

And yet I tried. I gave everything I had left. I fought for our love and the life we had shared. But that only served to amuse the cruel gods. The only way out of their callous trap was for us to find a way to be together. But try as we might. That would not happen. There was too much between us and the pain of our longing undid us even further. 

We were wounded animals made delirious by our insurmountable pain. Nothing made sense anymore. We were choking on the poisonous fumes of chaos. Once made fools by love, now made even more foolish by the hate of others.

And so, it came time for us to part. To divide the pain in two was the only option left to us. That and the hope that we could carry that halved burden without buckling under the weight of it and ceasing to live. Fated to exist a crushed and painfilled existence until our dying day.

We could not part without holding each other and kissing one last time.

It was when we kissed for the last time that I remembered our first kiss. Everything came around full circle then. Time was made a nonsense by the eternal nature of love and I realised that there could never be a final kiss, not really there couldn’t. Even if we both ceased to be, our love would remain and with it all of the kisses, and every meaningful moment we shared. All of it. Every single contented sigh. The dust motes hanging between us during our comfortable silences. The smiles that said more than a thousand words.

I kissed her and she was everything. 

We were everything.

Our first kiss opened us up to that possibility and we opened ourselves up in return. There was never any going back after that. Only ever a full circle that brought us back to the beginning and the wordless promise we made with that first kiss.

And so we kiss for the last time, once again. Knowing it can’t be the last time, even if we were never to kiss again. She will always be a part of me and I her. Despite ourselves, we dared to love with a deep ferocity and that love can never die.

The gods have had their dark fun with us, but they will not prevail. Only love and the sword of truth it wields can ever prevail. We’ve known this since the first time our lips ever met and we know it still. 

We kiss again and we feel a love that can never be denied. I may not have remembered the details of the first of our kisses, but I remembered exactly how I felt and what that kiss meant for the both of us when we tried to undo that first kiss with a last kiss that could never be a last kiss, only another first. Another beginning. Because the flame still burns and it always will.