The Kiss

“The Kiss” –By Seth Pevey May 9th 2005
         
Sometimes, I wish my life was more like a poem.
          I only kissed her just that once, after all.
          I remember what she’d said a few nights later when she was sober, because it was the last time I ever saw her.
“For the record, we did not make out.” That was all she’d said to me about it. It was late at night. Some drunken kid, his finals over, had pulled the fire alarm in the dormitories at five AM, causing she and I to run into each other out on the Bermuda grass. I remember her saying it then, both of us in our pajamas. That was three days after the kiss and three days before we both left college for the summer. For the record, she’d kissed me back, but she hadn’t meant it. That’s a lot worse than getting slapped in the face. By now I was used to such things, perhaps even a little embittered. The next morning, I slipped a note under her doorway.  “If records are your primary concern: forget the kiss- I’ve apparently miss-filed it. Please adjust your paperwork accordingly.”  As I lay in bed later on that evening I pulled out an old ratty book of poems my father had given me as a child.  The notes and markings in the book were things my Dad had instructed me in. Between these, tear-marks left on the book buckled its brittle pages.  I get that from my Mother. With too many words and too much love- poetry suits me sometimes more than life.  I flipped to my favorite- a one stanza called ‘since feeling is first’.
         ‘who is concerned with syntax will never fully kiss you.’
It’s by e. e. cummings. He’s been dead a while.
          After I left, I never saw her again, not after that once.
I did kiss her. Because it’s not hers to take away with words now that she’s given it, that kiss will belong to me forever.  We’d spent the whole day together, and half the night drinking. All morning we had shared each other’s eyes. We listened to songs and talked at the coffee shop about what they meant. She even read the short story I was writing at the time. By noon, I loved her- her black hair and silver nose ring; her dirty jeans with the holes torn in the knees- the kind you can tell are from genuine wear and not cut with scissors to give an impression of fashionable apathy.  We smoked cigarettes and talked about the female and male lovers she’d had, about her trip to Guatemala. Finding ourselves at a bar that night I watched her down cups of beer.  I nodded my head to the music, pretending to have a good time as some pushy guy friend of her’s drooled onto those patchwork jeans.  When she stepped away to get another drink, I caught her halfway back to our table. Without a word, she’d started dancing with me. I could smell her breath; that barley smell of ale.
‘Wholly to be a fool while spring is in the world.’ cummings makes it sound so easy.
“I’m leaving.” I said to her, with our song done.
I saw the word “why?” begin shaping on her pink lips, and in that split second my heart lurched, raced, spun through every outcome, motivation, context, rejection, acceptance, connotation and denotation of the other kisses in my life.
‘Since feeling is first.’ 
  Old e e, he knew why.
  For what was only a moment, I felt something inside me swelling.
  I was tired of hiding that swell day to day. This wasn’t a simple decision to kiss her or not to, this was a matter of pride, of courage. This was about not being ashamed, afraid to show other people my love. No matter how strange it was, I was sick of swallowing it all back down. One day, I thought, I will be dead.  I will die happier if I kiss her now.
  What’s a poem if no one ever reads it, after all?
  What’s language without love behind it? 
  Syntax without semantics I thought- that’s not the way to live.
  Before she could say anything, I leaned forward and kissed her- for maybe five seconds, maybe thirty, maybe one. 
  I kissed her, and everything else is just syntax.
‘Life is not a paragraph.’ cummings wrote that too, all in one poem.
“Good night” –that’s the only thing I said, and then I left. I went to the Frat house afterwards and watched the guys ride a tricycle around the house and smash beer bottles on their heads. Then, I walked home alone in the moonless dark.  On the walk back, I wondered if anyone knew how lonely I was, or if they knew how hard I fought not to be.
The next time I saw her was after the fire alarm went off, three nights later.  “For the record, we didn’t make out.” She told me. That was the only thing either one of us ever said to each other about the kiss.  Then, I never saw her again, not after that one time.
I slipped the note under her door and went back to my room.  On my way down the stairs I began contemplating if there was any such thing as a balance between mind and heart and if I’d been guilty of using too much of either one.  I pictured my Mother and Father waiting for me at home; the money my Dad makes to send me to school, to buy the food Mom would pour her love into cooking. 
Syntax, semantics; you can’t rely on just one or the other. We all fit into life somehow.
I left for home thinking; wondering just how my own records might appear to someone else who saw them- the clumsily handwritten notes on pattern, the tear-marked words all brittle and distorted.
On the bus ride back to see my family, I wrote a poem.















.