4

Kissing. This moment of wonder opening, like his lips, a soft kind of understanding, a fruit falling and seeping into the dry earth. She had never put time into kissing. Twenty years of marriage and before that there was no time for something so preparatory. One kiss perhaps or several, but each one a hurried preface to sex. She kissed and she closed her eyes and her mouth softened and it was something that invaded her whole body and the idea of sex was superfluous. The kiss was the whole of it and the idea of sex seemed unimportant next to this momentous. Inside the kiss was a bitter-sweetness, all the love songs she had dismissed as saccharine, all the awful romantic comedies that she had always avoided. Not one kiss, but a series of kisses that might never stop. But they did stop eventually and she put her fingers to her lips as if she could pick up this knowledge with her fingers and remove it.

She replayed it. In this space there was time for it. She rocked away from the kiss, hand to lips. Thought, they were right. Thought, how can there be this new thing after so many years. Thought, I will have to rethink my relationship to a whole genre. Thought, maybe it is too late now. Because there was a glimmer of awareness. At the edges of the kiss there was a falling forward and pain, her body tensing. An overwhelming hurt, like the flip side to the kissing, and when she came close to it she almost woke to it and it was too big. It might swallow her.

She turned back to the kiss, replayed on a loop. This new thing. Tried to link the lyrics to love songs to it, but there was no comparison. The words were specific, fixed, nothing. The kissing was some kind of chemical reaction. It was physical. Some change was taking place inside her body and she would not be the same when it was done. She leaned forward. She touched lips. She softened and slowly opened them.