My Miscellany: Let’s Talk About Kissing (part I)

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Rudy Clark had it right when he wrote “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss).”  You want to know if a man really loves you?

“If you want to know if he loves you so
It’s in his kiss
That’s where it is”

I truly believe that.  More on this in Part II of this.  I don’t know when it happened in my last horrendous relationship, but it most certainly was almost 2 years ago:  I remember one day when we were about to get at it, me thinking about Cher’s version of that song:  “can she tell it’s not in my kiss anymore?” 

The anguish and pain she had besieged me with for so long had finally done it:  my kiss was dead for her.  I was going through the motions and that–as I’m sure many of you can relate to– is the kiss of death to any relationship, the loss of passion and desire.  Why I didn’t leave for for almost another year and a half is the subject of another post.

Anyway…before we explore the kiss, I want to set this most important scene.  This scene will come to define the very essence of why the kiss was, and always will be, a most profound circumstance!

I want to tell you a story about a 12 year old boy.  A boy, who up to that point, had never known happiness or peace.  A boy abused.  A boy shunned by all the other kids.  A boy beaten and forgotten in his own home.  A lonely boy.  I remember the desolate feelings that constantly pervaded my thoughts.

I cannot remember much of my childhood before the age of 12.  I have fleeting images that come and go, but I have blocked most of it out.  I am sure it is some form of detachment; a form of self-preservation.  But I remember never having any friends.  I remember day after day of playing by myself.  I was always picked last in gym.

Lonely Child Seesaw

I always stood off to the side and watched and listened to the kids playing in the schoolyards.  It was always that way.  I remember weeks on end of being locked in my room.  I remember the visits to my Aunt’s house, my older cousin.  I remember the sadness.  I wasn’t a bad kid, it’s just nobody really paid attention to me.  Or, if they did, it was for trauma and abuse.

Then I kissed Angela.

I was about 12.  I was hanging around the back of the Elementary school when some boys told me there was a girl in the alcove who would kiss me if I went up to her.  It’s been over 40 years and I still remember my heart pounding out of my chest as I approached her.  I still remember the devastating look she gave me.

She smelled like a garden of a million flowers!  She was a lovely thing!  She was a gorgeous thing.  She was a fragile thing.  And when I kissed her, my world exploded into a thousand colors!  And it was no peck and run!  No, this was a deep and haunting kiss.  A transforming kiss.  A kiss that pulled something from deep within my soul that has nurtured and comforted me through all the rest of my 40 years on this earth.colors

I truly believed I had not seen colors in the world until that moment.  I just looked into her eyes and then bolted!  I remember staggering out of the alcove, the boys asking me how it was, but I just took off.  My heart pounding, an energy filled me from head to toe.  My inner sanctity was never the same.

Looking back I realize that I found love!  I found joy!  I found a serenity I had never known.  I found something else, but that wouldn’t be defined on that particular day, lol.  Or, all of that had more than likely found me!  For weeks I would walk by her foreboding house, aching to knock on the door and talk to her.  I had to see her again!  I was in love.

Alas, one day I did approach that scary looking door.  The porch crooked and dominated with broken furniture and pervasive shadows.  Finally, one hot summer day, I knocked on the door and stepped backwards, heart thundering out of my chest.  Then, abruptly and violently, the door swung open and the scariest man I think I have ever seen in my life stepped up and I turned and cleared the four porch steps and never approached the house again.  I never saw Angela again.  But I was inexorably changed for the rest of my life.  Because I kissed Angela.

(part II:  my search for that feeling again)

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