Kiss, Kiss

Open. Close. Open again. Like breathing. Like taking in gulps of air, but tasting. Like drinking, but eating. Soft pressure, then harder. Soft again, and tender. Dry lips, become wetter, are soft and dry and gentle on the outside, but the inside turns itself out to leave wetness, vulnerable and soft, but hard with the sucking, drinking motion of mouth against mouth. Tongues flick. Mouths part, but not completely part, separate gently, then return, and tongues flick again. A sound escapes her throat, half sigh, half call. Her head tilts back, exposes her throat. Their lips part and he travels in kisses down her throat and to her sternum. Hard, bony sternum that he kisses with mouth closed.

Does this lead anywhere? How can it not? In minds and hearts, does this kissing signify? They both tell themselves it doesn’t. So it doesn’t. They both say to themselves that it’s meaningless. So it is.

It stops. They sit. They rearrange the slight dishevelment of their coats, straightening their outward appearance. Sitting on a bench in a park in a city centre that neither can call home.

Meaningless kisses that go nowhere but say everything about their lives. Reassurance and danger. Boredom. They pick words from the air to give themselves some meaning, ignoring the words that sit, ready made, inside their heads.

At their age, they should know better. Both of them should know that their age is not the age to be sitting on park benches kissing.

“I’d better get back, then,” he says, though he doesn’t move a muscle, gives no sign of any intention to move.

“Yes. Me too,” she responds, and doesn’t move either.

They sit. His hand steals across to hers and touches it gently, then retreats as quickly as it advanced. He leaves his hand resting on the bench, close enough for her to put her own on top of it, and squeeze.

It means nothing. They are not everything. There are other things. Other people. An entire world that surrounds them and separates them, and keeps them from making this something.

Even though this is meaningless and could only ever be nothing.

Leaves fall from the trees. The rose bushes that bloomed and lost their petals through the summer have been pruned back and stand bare and witch-like in the flower beds. Like Raggety in Rupert The Bear. Spindly limbs and scratchy fingers. The branches of the rose bushes are black and damp looking, even though the day is dry.

Kiss; touch; kiss again. They sit and replay it in their minds, with different interpretations.

Never more than this. Never anything other than this. Brief meetings in the park to kiss and touch. Fleeting moments that do not count, because flesh has not been bared, secret scars have not been touched.

Neither wants the other to leave, but neither has the claim to keep the other there. To do more than this would spoil it. To see more would break the enchantment, make this something real.

She is the one who stands first. She is the one who can’t stand the way they sit on like this. She needs motion. She needs to get away, get free of this interminable moment, inert and unlovely as it is. So she stands and turns to look at him.

“I’ll call you,” he says.

The last kiss, then. This is the last kiss. She bends to deliver it, and tries to fill it with meaning. Her mouth lingers over his. She kisses his bottom lip, taking the soft cushion of it between her own two lips. She holds it there as the seconds tick by and she breathes him in, the closeness of his face to hers. Then she releases him.

She walks from the park and she doesn’t look back.

She takes the train home. The carriages are almost empty. Mid afternoon. Other people at work. The journey is quick, but seems to take forever, and the walk from station to home takes longer. Climbing the stairs, walking through damp fallen leaves, worrying that her hair is beginning to frizz in the autumn air. Hurrying to reach home and close her door.

She hangs her coat up in the hallway, and walks through to the kitchen. Filling the kettle, she looks out of the window onto the back garden. The cat teeters along the fence, unsteady and risking embarrassment by looking back at her through the window from the outside.

She goes to the back door and calls the cat in from the garden by making a kissing noise. She purses her lips and lets out a puff of air as she releases the tension. She calls the cat in and scoops her up, pressing her face into her fur. She looks at the cat, and the cat looks back at her.

“Kiss, kiss,” she says. “Kiss, kiss.”

The cat licks her nose, and she kisses her on the head, before putting her down again.

The cat runs to her bowl and starts to eat, looking up every so often for reassurance that her owner is still there. Security.

She looks at herself in the small mirror. Her hair has begun to frizz. She sweeps it to one side and plaits it, making a thick rope of it, brown and glossy. She tries to smooth the stray wisps, but they make an aura round her face, a halo backlit by the lights above and behind her. Her face looks tired as it gazes back at her through the mirror. There are fine lines around her mouth. The appearance of fine lines and wrinkles, as the adverts would have it. Fine lines around her eyes, too. Growing older. Losing the elasticity of youth.

One last kiss, ill-prepared for. Spur of the moment. A reaction. Listening to codes he didn’t even know he was speaking. Ending it while she still had the chance, before she was swallowed or left behind.

Trained to react, like the cat to her words. Conditioned to see endings tied up in innocuous sentences. Schooled in keeping the upper hand. Determined never to fall over the barrel, or be placed there.

Brief seconds of time. Moments when the silence said more than the kisses or the words. Those were the times when she could well have fallen. It wasn’t the kisses or the caresses, it was the silence of understanding. Silence with its own language that takes form in the kiss, in the movement of a mouth that says nothing and everything, but mostly nothing.

His voice falling into her ear, soundwaves and vibrations carrying the message through bone and membrane and nerves. Soundwaves and vibrations translated by her brain; the aural patterns saying one thing; her interpretation saying another.

If La La means I Love You, then I’ll Call You means Goodbye. Her interpretation, and a last kiss ill-prepared for.

“Kiss, kiss,” she says to the cat, and the cat turns her head away.

© J R Hargreaves 2006