When I was kid, I would cover up my eyes whenever there was a kissing scene in a movie. Gross, I thought. I squirmed in the face of something so slippery and adult. I grew up collecting puzzle pieces of information about love. I knew it had something to do with my parents, with tons of candy on February 14th, with movies, plays and books. Love had something to do with flowers and babies and kissing—gross.
In the third grade my first crushes began to flicker between several blond-headed boys swinging on the jungle gyms. Some had buzz-cuts, some had shaggy hair that hit their shoulders. I dressed exactly like all of them at that point and played soccer with them at recess. I remember kissing one of them on a dare at my birthday party. He had almond eyes and shaggy hair. After our half-second kiss, we both ran to the sink to wash our mouths out with soap, horrified by what we couldn’t understand.
My first relationship lasted longer than any other one I’ve had. It started the way most middle school romances did—through text message. Do you wanna be my girlfriend? It was the summer after fifth grade and I could not have been happier to read those words. He was a smiley dirty blond whose mannerisms closely resembled those of a golden retriever. The petrifying pressures of actual interaction proved to be too much for us, so we savored the safety behind a screen:
Good morning beautiful, wats up? <3
The heart emoticon—it created such an instant stirring in me. Something like butterfly wings tapping against my organs. Was I beautiful?
We brushed elbows a couple times at the lunch table. He pressed a poem in my palm and tied a red and orange string bracelet around my wrist. We kissed for the first time at the top of the stairwell. I wouldn’t really call it a kiss though; I was so nervous that all I could do was stand there, frozen. It was more of a lip high-five. I read that poem, scrawled in red ink, a hundred times, savored the crinkle of the paper in my fingers, so different from the usual tapping of my thumbs on a keypad. We went about growing up together, getting pimples, still texting as our main method of communication. Our friends’ relationships began and ended in a week. But us, we were the exception; we were real. Finally! I had meshed the puzzle pieces together. I had outgrown my childish disgust. Maturity felt good. As a year went by, I clung to my fragile image of love as if my life depended on it. My butterflies, which I once held inside with a quiet pride, started to fill my cheeks with a deep blush of shame. He broke my seventh-grade heart when he told me it was over at a Bar Mitzvah. But what I cried most about was how I let him do it. How I assumed some role I must have picked up from the girls and women in the movies—one where I was disposable, powerless. Moving on took longer than I liked to admit. The spoils of our epic love story, including the bracelets and poems, collected dust in a shoebox in my closet.
I looked to high school with a strange faith that I would find love there. Real love, not whatever I had before. Despite my noble goals and best efforts, I spent the majority of my first three years entirely single. Then ensued the long list of boys I longed for silently. I longed for a boy who occasionally wore a shoelace as a belt. I liked him because someone told me he wrote poems on the back of receipts. I still don’t understand him and I doubt I ever will. I longed for a Spanish exchange student, attending school for only a year. I will never forget the last time I saw him because I knew it was going to be the last time I saw him. It was a moment filled with potential energy and I had nothing to lose; I could have kissed him and I’ll always regret that I didn’t. I longed for a boy that I went to preschool with. I wanted to understand him. Figure out what made him so good inside, so good that it radiated out in a quiet, beautiful way.
I watched my friends date each other and wondered what I was doing wrong. Am I pretty enough? Why did I just say that? I spent a lot of time with myself, lovesickness a frequent visitor. I would stare at the tiny green blinking light on my fire alarm as I tried to go to bed at night, the same questions jogging through my brain. Who would he be? When would it happen? What would it feel like?
I soon found the answers. It was mid-March, junior year. I sat at a large table with a group of friends playing a card game. I pushed my notebook toward a skinny boy with small dreadlocks that poured over his forehead. He scribbled something down on paper and shot me a smirk. I felt my whole body glow as I peered at the page with my abandoned doodles and the words in a messy print reading,
You distract me in health class.
I leaned back in my chair holding my notebook. This was the perfect time for a witty, flirty comeback, something I had never uttered in regular conversation. I weighed the options in my head for a good while, before scribbling my response,
When you show up
He laughed as he read it. His face cracked into a huge smile, and I twisted in my seat, giddy and glowing. A couple days later our elbows brushed, then our shoulders and fingers. And soon I poured my mind into his. I could talk to him so easily it scared me; we only texted to find times to meet or call. I flinched when he told me that, come fall, he would leave the country for an entire year abroad. No visits, just eleven months of cultural immersion. The vicious flames of high school gossip began to lick at me. My love life, once wildly irrelevant , was now everyone’s concern. You should be careful with that boy. I just don’t want you to get hurt. Such hollow attempts at kindness. He skipped math class to ask me if this was really what I wanted. He assured me that he wouldn’t blame me if I felt like it was all too much. It was an easy choice. I knew it was wholly imbecilic to feel nothing for the sake of self-protection when I could feel everything. Taste the sweet rush of vulnerability. I wanted to know everything about him, know him like I know myself, and exhaust the English language in the process. I held his hand and we hurled ourselves into free-fall without a second thought—ignoring the concrete below us for as long as we could.
We kissed for the first time while resting on a pile of dried leaves.“Can I kiss you?” he whispered. He is the only boy who has ever said that to me. I didn’t expect him to, so I scrunched up my face in confusion. But my nerves didn’t paralyze me this time. I kissed him back and floated all the way home.
We fell in love the way winter falls into spring. The scent of melting snow filled our nostrils; quivering branches felt the fuzzy green of first growth. I would wait on my front porch for him to come back from school, shivering in my sweatshirt because it was just warm enough to go without a coat and the sun looked much warmer than it actually was. My normal distracted tendencies worsened intensely; I tried to read while I sat on the concrete steps but I couldn’t get through a single sentence without checking to see if he was walking towards me, where the trees parted and gave way to the winding suburban road. We buzzed with the compulsion of magnets. When can I be with him? The answer was whenever physically possible. The next five months were filled with the textures of love: dragonfly wings, prom corsage and boutonniere, poems scribbled on notebook paper, two closets becoming one, the birthmark under his left eye, memorizing the drive to his house, so much iced coffee, car windows collecting steam. One night we held each other on my back porch, a late night reunion after two weeks apart. Then I whispered, “Can you hear that?” We listened to the mist of gentle music creeping out of the woods. It sounded like the tones of wooden pipes. There was no explanation for it, we just marveled at our luck.
I remember trying to memorize his face the last time I saw it. Not just the angle of his chin, but the feeling of his lips on mine. His eyes. Those eyes remind me of a night sky but not one polluted with the steam of city fluorescents. One that you see while floating in a lake, deep in some forest where the trees part so you can float and watch the black and the stars as they pour into you. His eyes are like that. Curls of black eyelash surround them. When they meet mine, their nighttime wraps around me and holds me so tight that I can’t help but smile. Can’t help but smile in the face of that bright darkness.
Nothing could have prepared me for the pain of his leaving—the sudden impact, the crush of concrete. I had felt everything and now in his absence I breathed emptiness. It was something I had anticipated like death. Accepting the inevitability and the absolute ignorance of what existed on the other side. It felt like death, too.
Yet here I am—living. The scent of melting snow fills my nostrils. The sun streaming through the trees looks so warm. Winter falls into spring again, this time without him. A second shoebox sits dusty in my closet. I still stare at the green blinking light of my smoke alarm before I fall asleep. My questions still outnumber my answers. Right now I am my own, the future yawning wide before me. I am so terribly alive.
In your arms I understand all at once
My life has been building me up to us
In your hands I am mine, you take me to myself
The tenses I knew now they bring me to you
“Salt” by Lady Lamb