You realize there’s no choreographer or forgiving use of lighting. You are not equipped with radar to warn you of impending head-bumps. You don’t know what to do with your eyes or your hands, never mind your tongue. You worry about your breath, not only in terms of quality, but also because everything that should be involuntary response has become oddly laborious and you've suddenly forgotten how to exhale. Then, there may be the elaborate mechanics which surface from one kisser being about a foot-and-a-half taller than the other, or both of you having braces, or someone’s dad waiting just inside the door.

Maybe it’s not as horrific as all that, but it’s still not very enjoyable.

When you're a kid, things are black and white. There must be a single, correct approach to everything, and until you find the perfect method, the rest is obviously wrong. That’s pure, infallible, adolescent logic.

You set about perfecting your kissing technique through process of elimination. You don’t yet know that lips and tongue can be both exist in the same category of kissing, that they can even work in conjunction, so that a kiss butterflies into a symmetrical, mirror exercise. You don’t know that some of the nicest parts of the kiss don’t even involve full contact of the lips, just the inhaling of your partner’s buzzing shadow. The natural sensuality is diminished by the serious, inexperienced mindset of “Insert Tab A into Slot B.”

And then there are the politics of kissing. At the very beginning, kissing has to mean something. It’s not something that happens often, and, as a result the stakes are so damned high. At the very beginning, kissing never “just happens.” The starkness of choice is overwhelming.

You gain experience. Maybe it’s because you’ve felt your first mutual spark with someone whose shadow buzzed at the right frequency, giving you no choice but to suck it in. Maybe you’ve compiled enough of a hormone-inspired track record to have learned your way around someone else’s mouth. Whatever. Eventually, you learn that kissing isn’t something you know, but something you do.

With maturity come the gray areas, you unlearn your inhibitions, and you let your arbitrary boundaries bend a little. You allow for the give-and-take, compromise, the improvisational leaning and plunging.

You dive in.

A kiss doesn’t have to mean anything. One of my best kisses was administered by a completely platonic friend, when we were at a party. We had never even flirted before. One moment, he and I were standing at the edge of a field, feet away from our friends. Then he spontaneously leaned down and laid the most perfect kiss right on me, so deeply and deftly that all I had time to do was kiss him back. The next morning, we were both covered in mysterious bug-bites from making out in the field, and all we said was, “Dude, I saw you naked.” But, notice I still remember it. What a kiss.

Perhaps my worst kiss was shared with one of my best friends, when I was sixteen years old. He decided one night that he reciprocated the feelings I had always felt for him, and he kissed me while we stood on the brick steps of my parents’ house. I was happy and terrified and confused and excited, and did not yet know that black and white can overlap, and that risk can be simple. Despite the feelings behind it, it was an awful kiss which confused him as much as it did me. He avoided me for a few weeks, and then tried to be my best friend again, as if nothing had happened. It didn’t quite work. The kiss had meant too much, at the time. I had never considered immersion into gray as an option.

Dive in.

Dive in to your kisses, and something will follow. Not just in the physical sense.

A good kiss is a compendium of all the passion that you know or are capable of. Sometimes you kiss someone, and you just want to tell him to pay attention, and stop thinking so damned hard. Or to stop kissing teeth-first, like he has something to prove. Just relax, and kiss like it’s the best damned conversation you’ve ever had. Listen and breathe.

Some kisses start with the lips, and next, his arm is fused with your side and winding around your back while your leg somehow snakes upwards around his waist. But it’s still just a kiss.

Sometimes you drive your date home, and you suddenly realize you’ve been dropping him off for an hour and a half with the engine still running, and if you don’t stop dropping him off you’ll both die of carbon monoxide poisoning with your tongues down each others’ throats. You make some excuse about there being no overnight parking in his neighborhood, he goes upstairs, and you go home, because you both know that the kiss is best left as a starting point.

Some kisses start based on pure proximity. You’re talking, you’re talking more closely, and suddenly your faces are brushing against each other and you kiss in the same way you’ve been completing each others’ sentences all night; or you kiss because it is even better than shared silence.

Dive in.

Dive in so your breath spirals down your partner’s throat in a hysterical cyclone, and your teeth plummet into his gut with such velocity that they are pulverized like aspirin under a spoon. Kiss with gentle, giggly dustings, and let it expand. Kiss the kisses that make you see the whole world and your place in it with searing clarity, and then mercifully forget it immediately afterwards.

These are the tornadoes that give us hope and gravity. The proof of passion, however tempestuous or fleeting, can provide incentive to keep breathing. Forget everything, and consider the shades of gray. Dive in.

~ Last Five Entries ~

Arm-in-Arm Down Burgundy - 09.05.05

Motivated! - 08.25.05

Moths, and Relative Nonsense - 08.18.05

I Finally Have Internet Access in my Bedroom. But, No Ashtray. - 08.09.05

Here I Am - 08.02.05

---

BUY JEN'S BOOK! BUY IT! DO IT!

---

BUY DEAN'S BOOK, TOO! YOU KNOW YOU WANNA! SERIOUSLY.

---

««« Chicago Blogs Webring »»»

---

email:

---

words © luvabeans, 2003 - 2004