Mouths, Hers And Mine, As Eating Talking Portals To Kissed Selflessness
“I kissed goodbye the howling beast on the borderline which separated you from me.” —BD
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I know my shortcomings. I lack the ability to place settings and describe things and their attributes because of the way I live through a syrupy filter of my own thoughts that seek to connect and form relationships. So just dim the lights and put us at a table in the middle of a busy restaurant, oblivious to others, and tell me how I need to try your butternut squash ravioli. Your eyes shine like the reflection of the candle on the fork shines as you reach across the table. I will open my mouth and think about mouths—the way they consume the otherness of food for nourishment. And you will smile, waiting for my response, while I chew and silently say grace.
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Shall we call your dress blue? I don’t think so. Because the second we do, we put a limit on what the reader imagines. It’s enough to say ‘restaurant’ and ‘dress’, to welcome the reader’s participation in the creation of the scene, and to provide only the most essential details: like how perfectly your dress fits, the way it drapes your waist and hips, this elegance. Because this is mostly about what happens, after dinner, when we share dessert and talk. We tell stories with our mouths. Stories evoke stories which remind us of stories and, slowly, imperceptibly, we come to know one another. Talking and listening, we consume each other, nourishing loneliness. There are pauses in our conversation but not uncomfortable ones. The pause is where grace hides and waits to reveal her face.
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Mouths. Yes, they eat and talk but their essence eludes us until I have ripped off your maybe blue dress and we are kissing. It’s only when we kiss that the acts of eating and talking embrace and the physical act of consuming each other becomes a metaphor for getting to know one another. Kissing is not merely a playful obligation on the way to sex. To kiss—really kiss—is to abandon one’s literal self in an effort to become a work of art, to insatiably devour the boundary between you and your lover. You begin to disappear when you close your eyes in the early gentle nibbling, the tender pressing and nipping of lips. I watch you. I watch you falling like a leaf from a tree in autumn or rain in Seattle or a star. And then I grab your hair tight in my fist and we’re off: hungry ghosts starving without end. Good kissing is violent because its goal is not romantic. We desire to eat and be eaten, to lose ourselves and to forget the false distinction between us, to linger awhile in the perpetually paused silence of grace. Kissing your face.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Reader Comments (17)
every one should have this. not the words (though they are beautiful in their breaching, their adventuring): what they offer.
it would make the world a less stupid place, i think, if everyone had been kissed well. and often, Scarlett, indeed.
Sounds like you had a nice time. ;)
Goddamn. My husband hasn't kissed me in years, other than quick pecks. Goddamn.
I keep telling you not to write about us.
I remember this.
These words leave me with an ache deep inside. I miss those kisses.
I agree with Ellie, Elizabeth,& Marin. How depressing is my love life?
Ah. I know those kisses. I shall dream of mine, for a bit, until he comes home again, and we devour each other once more.
I once loved a woman who told me that kissing was holding someone so close that you couldn't even see them.
That people are married without this makes me sad. I could not be married without this. (Not meant to judge anything but my own heart. Oof.)
Kissing is the best. Sometimes I think the best I had ruined me for anything else, and I'm not sure it was worth it, but at least there's always something to aspire to.
(I totally knew about you and Aidan. God.)
This is savagely fascinating, not least because of the way it turns the social Darwinism of "eat or be eaten" on its head and transmogrifies it (รก la Calvin) from two organisms engaged in contest of dominance and subjugation into the fluid vanishing of boundaries as they merge and blend and... do that voodoo they do so well.
You, with all your words and lies. Me, with tears and protests of innocence. Both of us holding back like Zeus holds back lighting. That is to say, not at all.
I kissed you and, for a moment, you let me. I kissed you with every last breath of my love, the tears flowing down my face and into our mouths, as if providing proof of my desperation.
You kissed me back, not because you forgave me or because you were awarding me a second chance. You kissed me to dig your fingers into my wounds and tear into my flesh before it ever thought of healing into a scar. You accepted my tears and their sadness like you first accepted my hand in yours, years ago, as we discovered how comfortable it was for fingers to interlock.
That night was our first date. We stayed awake next to each other. The ocean waves crashing against your parent's boat and I worried that their sounds would not mask the uneven beatings of my heart. You told me that your cat had a heart murmur too and asked if you could listen to the machine that would, eventually, make my love for you. I was terrified that my heart would betray my feelings, not understanding that my words had already done so.
We stayed up until the sun rose on the ocean, your hand in my hand and your head on my chest.
That memory of you has already begun to disappear when you stand up to leave. Soon, it will be gone and I will be left here, howling and mad, wishing desperately for one last touch of our fingers. One last kiss to wipe away the only memory that you are leaving me with: kissing your face, my tears enough for both of us.
I forgot to leave you a comment the other day. I wanted to say...HOT.
Love it, BHJ! BUT there is always a big BUTT in the way dontyaknow...." when we share desert and talk." do you really truly share *desert* in LV????! The sand can be a bitch, yes?~I laugh, because my kids at school make this 'error' all the time...just like the 'grills' and the 'girls' thing...hope you had some good 'desert' my man! lalalalalalala!
@carla. Fixed. Thanks.
Wow........where have those kinda kisses gone?
I had those kisses and he took them to Colorado. Bastard. He needs to move back this way. I want to lose myself in the press of flesh.