The fear of the last kiss

I was convinced that my hand belonged to his hand, that the fact we loved the same music was no coincidence, and that the bitterness of the black tea we used to drink every evening at home was a sign of its quality. I loved the way he looked at me when I danced. 

I remember our first kiss. It was like a miracle, the whole cosmos seemed to be leaning on that moment and I was its centre. I could not believe that the person I was kissing was him, my platonic love of many years. In order to relax I had to imagine lovers from the past instead, lovers with who we had ended it over two glasses of wine and one sex on the couch. I remember pulling away from him for a moment to see if it was really him. His lips were like warm pillows that had a cool refreshing wet layer on top of them. At first, my lips were dry, like a scratchy paper that needed to be wiped clean. It made me nauseous but after a while I softened. It was a passing game at first and then our lips played a perfect game of tetris. I felt like I was melting into the couch we were sitting on. We were so good at it that we did not want to stop. My deepest desires about love were fulfilled.

The distance between our lives did not deter us. Nothing could stand in our way, not even the reality we both lived in different countries. We were visiting each other, writing poems, making jazz playlists until we bought pretty key chains for each other's pair of keys to our new home in our new place for life. We moved to the capital of the country we both grew up in. We grew up in countryside, speaking the same language but now we were big enough for the big city. It was a new unknown story now yet I had a feeling that someone had told this story to me before but I could not for the life of me remember how it ended. I started a new job. We bought a new couch.

With summer came autumn and the leaves started to fall on our terrace. It was always nice until the rain came and soaked them all. The weather turned cooler and the cup of fresh hot black tea had a thicker mist above it. When one moves to a new city, it takes a long time to traverse the streets to the point they start to feel like home. This is truly a step that cannot be skipped. It was not my first time there though and I knew that it would take some time to soak its streets into my feet. 

I was still soaked in our first kiss. It was exciting at first. Then it became lonely. When I realized my life might be set up here permanently I started to feel like I have been on a vacation away from home for too long and I just wanted to go back. Not back home where I grew up in. I never wanted to. If you have left the first home you have probably grown out of it. Like the clothes from school time that you used to love, that have a smell that makes the corners of your mouth lift up but you are too big for wearing them. Its colours have faded. But I was wearing warm kisses. The most beautiful dress of all. The feeling of the first kiss made me company. I belonged to his hands. They were like a breeze of pillows you turn over during a hot night. Months of new beginning were passing. For months I felt like I wanted to escape my own body which had become this far away vacation destination for me. I stopped dancing.

When winter came I had to buy a new pair of thick socks because the frost penetrated our home through the poorly insulated windows. I don't know why we didn't do anything with that. Why we stopped drinking black tea. His kisses still reminded me of our first kiss. A wispy, graceful tetris. But nothing else made me happy and so I spent my days waiting to hide in his arms. I was there like a mouse behind the fridge that someone had just seen walking through the kitchen. 

When we got home from Christmas we spent with his family, the walls were already moldy from the cold. Even though his hands were still warming me, everything around me was cold. We continued to kiss but my lips occasionally turned to dry paper. When he wasn't home, I curled up in the corner of the couch, burying my body deep into it, almost like the first time we kissed. I tried to save myself at night's pouring myself a glass of wine or two.

I always heard about stories how love changed and wasn't what it seemed to be in the beginning but never stories about functioning love in dyfunctional places. Love will harness you, it will hold you helplessly and you will love it. What sucks is when that love ties you up in the wrong place. The first time you kiss you don't notice what's going on around you and if you experience those kisses over and over again it's possible to get lost in time and space, and then one day when you remember and you start to dimly see from behind your closed eyelids you realize that maybe you're somewhere where you're dying at a faster rate than at other places. And what will hold you is not the bliss of the first kiss, but the fear of the last. The thought of that last kiss makes me dizzy. I'm scared of scratchy lips. I'm afraid of my replacability. 

I'm in a place where I'm dying faster and more surely. Living the paradox of the loneliness and two hands that seem to shoot heroin into my veins as they press me close. We're so good at this, I can't stop even though I'm somewhere where the only thing I can love about myself are the memories who I used to be. The fear of the last kiss strangled me as much as the first one in the first place.