Days 0640 & 0641

Does a man’s approach to a first kiss reveal his personality flaws and fabulosity?

I don’t mean where and when the kiss happens, but the actual mechanics and technique.

If it’s matter of fact and insistent, does that mean the man doesn’t have any desire to unpeel the onion layers of my personality? That he’ll believe that what he see is all of what I am.

The one that doesn’t get the hint of tightly gritted teeth as a fortification against their probing cow-tongue and tells you to ‘just relax’ as if that’s what’s keeping your incisors on high alert. Is that the man who never takes a ‘hint’ — not that I’m a fan of hints generally but telling someone to get their tongue the hell out of your mouth seems like it would put paid to any continuing mouth-to-mouth activity. (And maybe that’s the lesson here: it should be said and it should end then and there).

The ones who start gently and slowly get to know your lips and your kisses; they are the ones who watch and think and care? Or do they just need you to take the lead?

Kissing is weird in the scheme of things. It doesn’t make a lot of rational sense; you can’t be vigilant and on alert for predators while you’re doing it. It doesn’t improve fertilisation (as far as I know).

But it can be really amazing – with the right person. Gross kissers are gross; like expecting a prince and getting a certified accountant. The sooner you get out of there, the better

Beautiful kissers are poets, tangling you up in their mouths, listening, changing rhythm, letting their words fall onto your lips like snowflakes.

Day 0223

I am sitting here as it grows dark listening to the rain. My bedroom window is open and my nose is just a bit chilly. I can smell the cool of the outside air and a waft of heavy smoke from the neighbour’s chimney. Smoky air floats differently when the world is dark.
I don’t know what part of all this did it, but some one of those sensations threw me back an embarrassingly large number of years to a night when I was 21.
I was lying on my college boyfriend’s mattress in his share house bedroom. It was a very decidedly single mattress, but that was ok; we were both skinny as blades of grass.
The world outside was whirling with snow and the night was bright with street lamps reflecting off of it into the driveway-side window of his bedroom.
The house was heated with one of those old boiling central heating systems, the ones that coil around and around and, for some physics denying reason, were always placed right under the window sill.
Those heaters are hot. And humid. And the room was torpid with it. We’d flung up the sash window to get some relief.
And as I lay there – room dark, outdoors lit up – snowflakes flew in gently above my head and settled slowly, heavily on my cheek, my eyelashes, my forehead.
And I could smell the wetness of the cold, the abrasiveness of the frozen air.
It was one of the most memorable and cosy moments in my life. My limbs warm, warm, warm under a blanket, the tip of my nose pricked by frozen stars.
I wish I could go back there: back to 21 even. Back to everything in that moment, gather it up in a bag and keep it to peek into every once in a while.