Hungry for it

A study in kissing

Everybody wants to kiss. Everybody wants to stand, perched over the parapet, mouth latent and gaping, magenta cheeks, ready to receive. You’re food and drink to me, Henry Miller writes to Anaïs Nin after they meet in Paris.

I’m generalizing, naturally, because I like to think that this is a universal thing we’re feeling, not an ailment I’ve been subjected to, it’s calmer this way. I like to imagine everybody wants to fall victim to the cruelty of affection, be looked at with equal hunger and curiosity. Don’t mess with the ratio: if it leans too much into the hunger, then, suddenly, your insides are on fire telling you to run, and whether you’ll stay or not depends on age and the degree of your confusion. If it leans too much into the curiosity, then it’s library talk, quiet and monotone, as in there’s no tension, you’ll feel like an old book at the back shelf and you’ve been here before, yawning through these lifeless matters. Therefore, hunger and curiosity, equal. It’s important.

And if it’s not everybody —let’s say some can do without the kissing— then it’s the hungriest of us, awoken from our slumber in the spring and fragmenting into fantasy. I’m trying to unite us in this mess, to find your pain points of desire and press into them with my thumb and you could do the same to mine so we finally have something in common. I’m tired of being more dependent on the oxygen that is kissing and everyone else walking around just slightly self-obtained, sustenance at an arm’s length, having better things of focus, bigger plans. What’s more important, really, than kissing? Only the anticipation of said kissing, or its dividends. I cannot think of much else.

I study my subjects, those who seem unaffected by the fever, involuntarily peering through the glass into one of those old Dutch houses that keep their big calvinist windows open, a scene inside is lively but subtle; a young mother on the phone over the kitchen table, her baby in the high chair staring at her like she’s the only thing in the world, in admiration of surrender, and to the baby, naturally, she is the only thing, shiniest hair and fragrant skin, the most kissable, the most admirable. What is motherhood if not a permeable entry point to eternity? A mesmerizing picture, especially when I’m the creep behind the window, studying the love, taking it in, wondering what it would be like to have this continuity, something beyond myself to allocate my labor. But the mother has so many earthly worries and the baby only has one —how to get more of her love, more of the attention— and I feel the asymmetry and it bothers me that in this moment, and for as long as I’ve known, I am more like the baby and not the mother. Does she feel free? Ecstatic, beautiful? How will I know that I can be a giver, not an endless receiver? Will I still have pity hours to myself?

And when I’m walking through the south district, with finance soldiers in matching vests spilling out of their open cubicles for lunch break, in groups of three or four, fraternity as scheduled, stretching the shiny noon hour into an infinity of restrained excess and burnt coffee, ready for Friday or the annual free trip, I study them even harder. They seem so untethered, exchanging saliva with the system by means of doing something right, even better if it comes with a slop bowl and a single-use wooden fork that will disintegrate in landfills faster.

If I sound mean, I can explain – you’ve already guessed I find myself so envious of this character type. The kind that capitulates to the system but not human desire, that needs many things moderately when I need just one thing very miserably. A kiss. I have long wanted to get inside their minds, to dissect the roads and the tarmac, to arrive at the conclusion they must be naturally less burdened by all the kissing and the spring, that it doesn’t rule over their waking heads like it does over mine. They flirt with their coworkers and pay too much for bad coke and some have ‘work wives’ they jack off to, desire like spare change, and probably have equipped themselves with everything it takes to build a decent life, the kind that doesn’t need a disclaimer or an outro, because their kissing isn’t sacred and it never had to be, never distracted them since they haven’t made a religion out of regular affairs, and whenever I’d try to inhabit this type of casualty, to agree more with the system and less so with my hunger’s altar, I’d get a foretaste of death and fall flat on my face and chip my front tooth and would have to excuse myself into the bathroom stall to cry my eyes out.

Their desire is part of the equation, mine is the sum of everything. And acute, too, clouding everything. That would explain why they’re strong and capable and ready to put extra hours in, and I’m always just on the very edge of doing something wrong. They’re lesser thinkers and better fighters, faster predators, they don’t let the carnal take over, and what’s even the point of a constitution like mine if all we are good for is shedding blood in someone’s war?

I once climbed a rooftop after school to impress a boy. He said he’d meet me there for a kiss, and he was vague about it, and I did it. I was young then, voluntarily sheltered —awaiting breast formation before I’d dare to cross first base— trying out novelty to make myself a more playable character. I wanted to kiss. And I stood on the precipice, heart beating through my nauseated chest, it was so high and windy up there, the restlessness resisted settling. He never showed up and I’d suspected it, miniatures of everything barely moving far on the pavement, I couldn’t stop picturing myself tripping and falling over the parapet. Life moves so slow and mistakes are so immediate. It occurred to me then I’d been cursed or blessed at birth and will spend my whole life risking it for kissing.

It’s fever season. Antihistamines and pollen. I’m spring-born for a reason, we’re matching and entwined in our hysteria of kissing and admiring, giving and receiving, losing our minds with hunger and curiosity. I used to think my heart would never grow wide, like I would always have to gasp for air, to hide in the abstract or climb rooftops. But the cup is full and overflowing, and I mean it literally, too, because I did grow boobs, and none of it took the effort I thought it would. It was a matter of another spring.