The Best Kiss I Ever Had
I executed the careful choreography of ending up in line behind him very purposefully ‘by accident’. I still remembered my pageant-girl smile, and despite the fact that adolescence, with its constant soundtrack of stiff-lipped sneers, had tried to train it out of me, I had no hesitation about breaking it out for him – it hadn’t been long since I got my braces off, and I knew that I still had a few years of whiteslick grin left in me before my neglect for my retainer would burn away all of my parents’ investments in orthodontics for me.
“I love your coat,” I told him, and when he smiled something just lit all up inside me. He didn’t lift his chin [in my memory he is so impossibly tall] and turn it away; he didn’t mumble evasive. He lit up too, he told me where he got it [his dad? I don’t remember], and he said, “Thanks, I like it a lot too.”
It was a weird kind of Ren-Faire grace he had. Despite the fact he was so, so music-video cool looking, there was something about that slightly-awkward elegance that told me, in a way that made my fingertips get cold and my heart seize dizzily, that I could have this, maybe.
We went together to some other orientation room where we casually sat beside each other at a long school table; vinyl-topped but with a pattern of wood the whorls of which I could draw with my fingertips over and over again. I don’t remember anything else about what happened in that room except the bang-bang-bang of my heart in my ears, which were burning at the tips, and the way that under the table he and I sneaked our hands ever closer together, first pretending accidents and then deliberately.
Pad of thumb and then thumb to palm, until we were tracing the lines inside the cradles of each other’s hands with the softest, the most careful touch. I couldn’t hear for the humming at the roof of my mouth where my tongue cleaved like a loaded weapon. I couldn’t breathe. To this day I have never felt like that while touching a man.
The fact that I was touring an ‘early college’ that could possibly change the course of my future became secondary and irrelevant. We wanted to be alone with each other.
We managed to evade the tour group and on the side of one of the college’s austere brick-faced buildings, we found some kind of stoop, some kind of back stair. That coat; he put part of it around me against the cold. It wasn’t snowing, but snow fell intermittently from the weighted bows of the pine trees. It smelled like evergreen and cold, like damp and ice-edged trembling needles, and we made some kind of soft, tremulous joke about the image of our low breath on the air.
We talked about the internet and about fantasy books. He told me about the message boards he enjoyed and about his Dungeons and Dragons character. This strange, gorgeous creature understood me, and blanketed in winter, so far from where we were both ‘supposed to be’, with the adults discussing our academic future, I felt I could have stayed there forever, this breathlessly silent pocket of white where someone understood me and no one was ever going to find us.
We were aware there was not much time before we were meant to be ‘back’ someplace, wherever everyone was, to reunite with our relatives. I don’t remember who started it. It felt inevitable, mutual, some kind of slow-burning explosive muffled in the still, cold air. The quality with which we kissed – warm, even though the chill, or nerves, made my jaw tremble heedlessly, had the quality of at once being timeless, endless, and very temporary.
I had spent all of my young life wanting to be alone in a silent, impossible world with a dark prince, and here we were. And yet I didn’t feel anymore like the child who’d paged through fantasy novels about dragons. I was fifteen years old. I might be about to go to ‘early college’. I had kissed before, hurried and tremulous things stolen from school dances, things that felt like a mutual consent to humiliation inside or behind school buildings or while at summer camp, but this was a real kiss. I felt then that it would probably be all right to be a grown-up, like, at some point.
The song ‘Full of Grace’, by Sarah MacLachlan [grace, please, I was a fifteen year-old girl] became lodged in my head as surely as if we were sitting in a music video. And it was chaste, in a way. We only kissed, and sometimes would take breaks to hold each other and talk more. At one point, someone opened the door in which we were currently sitting, apologized it, closed it.
Like guilty children, we had to return to our parents, who’d been looking for us. My parents were annoyed for having had to wait for me/search for me. And then they saw him coming across the wooded parking lot from me. Quietly we exchanged addresses in front of our parents. We were going to mail letters, we said.
A letter from him arrived a few weeks later. I scanned it for declarations of love and found none. He wrote about his frustration with his parents. He wrote about how annoyed he was he had to babysit a special-needs child in his neighborhood to whom he referred, inexplicably, as “the mongoloid soldier,” a word I found distinctly discordant, unsettling. The fondest word in the letter was “milady.” Even the letter’s signature was strangely formal, unsentimental.
I think I must have felt disappointed. Misled, maybe. Emotionally starving. At the time I registered the sentiment as ‘nothing’, put the letter back in the envelope and put the envelope in the big cabinet at my bedside. I entertained ideas of writing back; I never did, but I kept the letter just in case I wanted to, someday. Even when I had a serious relationship, the knowledge of that letter lurked there irrationally, like a treasure map to an escape route.
When I grew older I divested myself of many relics that were no longer personally relevant: The picture of my painful unrequited 8th grade crush, some diaries I kept during unremarkable periods of my life, mementos of girls who were my Best Friends Ever for a few months until we forgot one another; valentines, small gifts I had intended to reciprocate but never did. Things I largely don’t regret throwing away, except that letter from someone named Mark Sidwell of whose features I have no memory except for that hair and that coat and that kiss.
Still sometimes I look for that kiss in every man I meet. The chill that I no longer remember as the snow; the sense of belonging, the sense that time had stopped just for us. I never ended up going to the ‘early college’, but these days I occasionally meet people who mention having gone and I remember the Sarah MacLachlan song ‘Full of Grace’ and how when the boy came to give me his pencil-scrawled address in front of my parents, my Mom said, dryly, “so I guess you were with Darth Vader that whole time, hm?” Dad wanted to know why he’d been wearing sunglasses, I think.