Kisses

I am, as they say, a romantic. I visualize such things in my head constantly, flowers and slow dances and nights spent beneath the glow of one hundred million stars. I play out scenarios in my mind — and have been doing this continuously since I was young, dragging out a particular story for days on end, creating backstories and betrayals and personality traits. I get attached to these characters I create, though I have never written them down — nor written about them — in my life. These beings, who live and breathe inside my skull, a pounding of my imagination set aflame by my willingness to allow it to flourish, are my greatest creation. Pen and paper are thought and muscle tissue, the edges of words scraped against my brain matter.

But I digress, although I do spend countless hours daydreaming about these big things for other characters — though, I’ll be honest, I’ve thrown myself in these things quite a few times, and if I haven’t, she’ll look and act like me — there is one thing I have never been able to do. 

The kiss. 

I have never, in all my life, managed to imagine two characters, though their chemistry is palpable, tangible, emotion thick in the air like sticking fragrance, to kiss. I have no particular reason for it, or, at least, I could not come up with one, until tonight. At exactly 10:57 p.m., October ninth, twenty-twenty one. 

I cannot imagine it because I, simply, cannot imagine it. I have never experienced it! I’ve watched movies and TV shows and hell, searched it up on YouTube out of curiosity, but I haven’t done it myself. And how could I? The logistics of it seem incredible! Where would they put their hands on me? To cradle my jaw in both palms, hold my chin, curl their arms around my shoulders? To press the tips of their fingers around my hips, or grip my waist as though they are drowning, and I, the only lifeline, could pull them from an ocean of feeling, a sea of sound. 

What would I do? Grip their hair, long or short, and clench my fingers in? Hands around their rib cage, splayed open? If things get heavy, what would happen? Would I be against a wall or pinning them midair with a hand to the neck? 

Gah! Kisses! What shall I do with those? 

Ah, well. I am in high school, after all. If the time comes, and my first kiss happens, (no, not the almost kiss in my mom’s bedroom — a real, honest to goodness, lips on lips, hands somewhere other than dangling at my waist, kiss) I’ll most likely go home and reimagine it. And twist it some other type of way. Give it to another girl, a girl dreamed up and brought to life by my juvenile imaginings. 

And maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to imagine it for everyone onward too.