5
" We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don't
grow on trees, like in the old days. So where
does one find love? When you're sixteen it's easy,
like being unleashed with a credit card
in a department store of kisses. There's the first kiss.
The sloppy kiss. The peck.
The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we
shouldn't be doing this kiss. The but your lips
taste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss.
The I wish you'd quit smoking kiss.
The I accept your apology, but you make me really mad
sometimes kiss. The I know
your tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you get
older, kisses become scarce. You'll be driving
home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road,
with its purple thumb out. If you
were younger, you'd pull over, slide open the mouth's
red door just to see how it fits. Oh where
does one find love? If you rub two glances, you get a smile.
Rub two smiles, you get a warm feeling.
Rub two warm feelings and presto-you have a kiss.
Now what? Don't invite the kiss over
and answer the door in your underwear. It'll get suspicious
and stare at your toes. Don't water the kiss with whiskey.
It'll turn bright pink and explode into a thousand luscious splinters,
but in the morning it'll be ashamed and sneak out of
your body without saying good-bye,
and you'll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it left
on the inside of your mouth. You must
nurture the kiss. Turn out the lights. Notice how it
illuminates the room. Hold it to your chest
and wonder if the sand inside hourglasses comes from a
special beach. Place it on the tongue's pillow,
then look up the first recorded kiss in an encyclopedia: beneath
a Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C.
But one kiss levitates above all the others. The
intersection of function and desire. The I do kiss.
The I'll love you through a brick wall kiss.
Even when I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth,
like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones. "
― Jeffrey McDaniel
13
" Her next words took me by surprise. I lay as still as I could, barely breathing, afraid that if I moved she would stop speaking her heart.
“My mom wanted six children. She only got me, and that sucks for her because I was a total weirdo.”
“You were not,” I said.
She twisted her head up to look at me.
“I used to line my lips in black eyeliner and sit cross-legged on the kitchen table … meditating.”
“Not that bad,” I said. “Crying out for attention.”
“Okay, when I was twelve I started writing letters to my birth mother because I wanted to be adopted.”
I shook my head. “Your childhood sucked, you wanted a new reality.”
She snorted air through her nose. “I thought a mermaid lived in my shower drain, and I used to call her Sarah and talk to her.”
“Active imagination,” I countered. She was becoming more insistent, her little body wriggling in my grip.
“I used to make paper out of dryer lint.”
“Nerdy.”
“I wanted to be one with nature, so I started boiling grass and drinking it with a little bit of dirt for sugar.”
I paused. “Okay, that’s weird.”
“Thank you!” she said. Then, she got serious again. “My mom just loved me through all of it. "
― Tarryn Fisher , Thief (Love Me with Lies, #3)
