There is a lot of confusion in my head over my first kiss. You’d think that I would remember such a singular, emotional moment. And yet, the actual moment of my lips on hers is gone. All that’s left is the events surrounding the actual kiss, the sight of her face, the warmth of the sun, the smell of the tall grass in which we hid, the sounds of the wind through that tall grass, and the tension in my chest that felt as though my heart was going to burst out of my ribcage.
I can see her brown hair, long, past her tanned shoulders. I can mimic, now, the pose my body took in the moment immediately after – sitting, leaning back, partially rolled over on one side, my left arm holding me up. The memories are strong of the precise way my muscles and skeleton were arranged. I couldn’t tell you if any of the other elements of that memory were accurate or not, however. I can’t even recall her name – it might have been Patty, or Heidi. The field of grass in which my memory of the events surrounding my first kiss – that may or may not have been next door to a church, or subsequent events and re-rememberings or re-tellings of the story may have altered all that beyond the original imprinting, erasing the details and overlaying them with new, fictional, half-remembered details.
I must have been young, because another thing that I am nearly certain about was that the kiss took place when my family lived in Kalama, Washington, so it had to have taken place before I entered 3rd Grade. That would make me, what?, 8 or younger? Yes, I was a precocious child. I definitely remember trying to kiss Heidi Foster, Kenny Foster’s sister, in Kindergarten or maybe 1st Grade and shocking my teacher, and I snuck under the cafeteria table at lunchtime to kiss Patty’s knee, and that was absolutely at Kalama Elementary School. But before those two events, I remember laying in the tall grass with the brunette girl, and kissing. And the two later, clumsier attempts may have lent the names of the girl to the first one.
I remember thinking about kissing the brunette girl. And such a feeling of excitement and shame is attached to that memory, surely I must have carried out the thought?
I kissed her.
I’m sure of it.
As sure as I can be of a memory that has tattered and torn over the past 35 or more years, becoming like lace, only less patterned. A translucent memory of a warm golden-lit afternoon in tall grass with a brunette girl.
Only one kiss. I think it was all we had time for, because another feeling that accompanies this particular near-remembrance is that of others, searching for us. A game of hide-and-seek, perhaps? Or is that sought-after feeling just residual guilt for the forbidden kiss she and I shared?
My first kiss. And followed, apparently, by two other, lesser attempts. And then…
…long years of no, or next to no, more kissing. I remember a bloody nose from a buddy whom I thought was a friend. I remember gasping for air after having completely failed to breach the other line in a game of Red Rover. I remember crush after crush, all unrequited, for many more brunette girls, down through the years, until eventually, in high school, kissing Amy Lincoln, in the park behind the library, over and over again, and finally, after a decade, feeling again the warm press of lips against mine, and mingling breaths with a woman who also wanted to kiss me back.